Nelson Got His Big Man, Then Big Problems

Here’s a question Don Nelson no longer asks:

What else could go wrong?

Nelson used to ask, but fate kept answering.

Two seasons ago, the Warriors won 55 games and Nelson was voted coach of the year for the third time.

Last season, they lost 312 player-games to injury. Their top scorers--Chris Mullin, Tim Hardaway, Sarunas Marciulionis and Billy Owens--were together on the floor for 2 minutes 37 seconds. The Warriors went 34-48. Nelson emerged looking bloated and haggard at the same time.

Last spring, he pulled off his coup, getting his long-sought big man, Chris Webber. Announced a giddy Nelson to a crowd of 4,500 in Oakland Coliseum on draft day: “Our time is now.”

It might well have been, except that Warriors began dropping like flies.

First, Marciulionis, who averaged 19 points two seasons ago, tore up his right knee in a summer pickup game.

Then Webber, about to fly to Oakland for the start of camp, underwent an emergency appendectomy.

Said Nelson: “I must be paying for something terrible I did as a child.”

Whatever it was, it must have continued into his adult years because Tim Hardaway, the leading scorer, went down next, tearing up a knee and leaving for the season, like Marciulionis.

Said Chris Mullin: “The way things are going, I’m next.”

Give that man a torn tendon at the base of the little finger on his right hand in the final exhibition, requiring surgery.

In what passes for good news in the Warriors’ camp, Mullin will be out for only six weeks.

Webber, who was on crutches at practice Tuesday after spraining his ankle, probably will be sidelined for the first two games of the regular season.

Said Nelson: “I don’t know what to say.”

The Warriors’ point guard is now Avery Johnson, whom they got off the waiver wire.

Says George Shirk of the San Francisco Chronicle: “It’s like covering the Titanic in slow motion.”