Warrior Refrain: No, Nellie : Analysis: Golden State coach, general manager, once among the NBA’s most envied, loses jobs.

If pride goeth before a fall, Don Nelson must have a lot because the NBA never saw anything like the fall that ended when he splattered to Earth on Monday.

At season’s start, he was one of the league’s most respected coaches and his Warriors were a rising power. By the All-Star break, they were in ruins and his assistant, Bob Lanier--whom Nelson had hired to work with Chris Webber--had his job.

Nelson had hoped his son and assistant, Donnie, could finish the season as coach, but even that was denied him. He resigned, but insiders say it was mutually agreed upon by Nelson, who was ready to go, and the club’s new owner, Chris Cohan, who was ready to be rid of him.

“I basically have done a lousy job this year, and I definitely deserved to be replaced,” Nelson said at a news conference in Oakland.

“My energy hasn’t been there this year for a number of reasons. I think I lost a little passion this year and when I tried to get it back, I was physically ill and I couldn’t.”

Since Nov. 17, when they traded an unhappy Webber, the Warriors had gone 7-30. Young players, such as Latrell Sprewell, wrote the numbers of traded teammates Webber and Billy Owens on their sneakers. Tim Hardaway, a Nelson mainstay, said the season disintegrated “when two people who could have sat down in a room and talked . . . didn’t”--blaming Nelson as much as Webber.

A devastated Nelson seemed unable to confront his players in his old style and claimed he had made the trade, knowing it would finish him.

Nelson, pleading illness and exhaustion and planning a quieter lifestyle, said he might stay as general manager, but Cohan began thinking the once-unthinkable: cashing him in altogether.

On Super Bowl Sunday, the Warriors were routed at Chicago, trailing by 39 points with the normally affable Andy Dolich, a former executive of the Oakland A’s who was newly hired by Cohan, on the scene, looking grim.

Hardaway came out of that game, took a seat away from everyone else, and when Donnie Nelson went down to see what was wrong, harangued him at length.

Afterward, Don Nelson said, as he had on several occasions, that winning “isn’t that important, right now.”

Cohan began talking to players, reportedly visiting the home of the other great Nelson loyalist, Chris Mullin, whom the coach had seen through alcoholism.

Negotiations began last week, with Nelson asking for the $1-million bonus he would have been owed if he were being fired. Cohan reportedly agreed.

*

How could this have happened to Don Nelson?

He is the NBA’s only three-time coach of the year. For years, he was its most powerful coach, the only one to act as his own general manager. People lined up to hire his assistants and proteges: Del Harris, Mike Dunleavy, Rick Majerus, Garry St. Jean, Mike Schuler, Gregg Popovich.

In Milwaukee, where he started as a coach, Nelson became a legend, as much for charitable endeavors like “Nellie’s Farm Fund” as for his coaching. And he was an original as a coach, unaffected and refreshing. Players swore by him.

But he had an ego, no matter what pains he took to hide it. He didn’t like being meddled with. He lasted only a year in Milwaukee after his sponsor, Jim Fitzgerald, sold the Bucks to Sen. Herb Kohl. In a feud with Kohl, Nelson once blurted, “I am the Milwaukee Bucks!” though he was embarrassed enough to insist later he hadn’t meant it.

When Fitzgerald bought the downtrodden Warriors, Nelson moved west. He soon turned the franchise around--it hasn’t had an unsold seat for six seasons--with a little team that played David to Goliaths like the Utah Jazz, whom they swept in the 1989 playoffs with the 6-foot-5 Terry Teagle guarding Karl Malone.

However, with expectations rising, injuries all but blotted out the 1991-92 and 1992-93 seasons and a different Nelson emerged.

He now answered to Fitzgerald’s lieutenant, Dan Finnane, who was not above reining him in. Finnane vetoed some of Nelson’s more expensive plans and told the press that there would be no more “excuses.”

Nelson’s ego was no longer invisible. Coveting the honor of coaching the Dream Team in the 1992 Olympics, he paid his own way overseas to scout European teams. The selection committee picked Chuck Daly, instead.

Great coaches come with egos, however, and everything might have been OK but for Webber, who chafed at Nelson’s bellowing and claimed he wouldn’t talk it out afterward. Nelson acknowledges that he never tried calling Webber during his holdout.

It wasn’t as though Nelson had turned into a monster, however. While Webber, Owens and others complained about him, a journeyman guard named Avery Johnson, who was spending a year with the Warriors between stints in San Antonio, credited Nelson with turning his career around.

But the NBA isn’t a people business as much as a star business. Webber, a rising star, left the Warriors in November and they were never the same.

Nelson left Monday. He’s 54 and his star shone for a long time, but no one knows when--or if--it will again.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

DON NELSON’S COACHING RECORD

A look at the coaching record of Don Nelson, who resigned Monday.

Year W L Pct Fin 1976-77 27 37 .422 6th 1977-78 44 38 .537 2nd 1978-79 38 44 .463 4th 1979-80 49 33 .598 1st 1980-81 60 22 .732 1st 1981-82 55 27 .671 1st 1982-83 51 31 .622 1st 1983-84 50 32 .610 1st 1984-85 59 23 .720 1st 1985-86 57 25 .695 1st 1986-87 50 32 .609 3rd 1988-89 43 49 .524 4th 1989-90 37 45 .451 5th 1990-91 44 38 .537 4th 1991-92 55 27 .671 2nd 1992-93 34 48 .415 6th 1993-94 50 32 .610 3rd 1994-95 11 24 .314 6th Totals 814 597 .577