The Milwaukee Bucks of the 1980s are one of the NBA’s great forgotten teams. These were the Bucks of Sidney Moncrief, an all-around dynamo and deserving Hall of Famer (who nonetheless doesn’t get quite enough love). Also of great players like Marques Johnson and Terry Cummings, and the less great, like Paul Mokeski and Charlie Criss.
Every season from 1979-80 through ‘86-87, those Bucks won between 49 and 60 games, only to bump their heads in the playoffs against a glass ceiling constructed by the Sixers and Celtics. Four times Philadelphia took them out, and Boston did so the other three times. Milwaukee never won a conference championship in that span, much less a title.
So that team is an afterthought, a curiosity. A steppingstone for some of the greatest clubs of all time, including the ‘82-83 Sixers and the ‘85-86 Celtics.
And yet, in a very real sense they live on through the mad scientist who coached them at the time, Don Nelson. Nelson, who died earlier this week at age 86, was a true visionary, a guy who paved the way for the positionless basketball we see in the NBA today. For what has become known as a sprawlball, where players standing between 6-5 and 6-8 spread the floor and fire when ready, usually from the 3-point line.
There are those who detest this style of play, who argue that surely not everybody should be gunning from the arc. Objections noted, though there is definitely something to be said for putting an accent on skill as opposed to the low-post thuggery that was in vogue until the turn of the century.
I remember, for instance, seeing a photo from the 1984-85 Finals, in which the Lakers beat the Celtics. Eight guys (most of them future HOFers) were jostling for real estate within 10 feet of the rim. It was mute testimony to the way things used to be, to the Neanderthal days.
Nellie was ahead of his time, in that he freed guys to play to their strengths, no matter their dimensions. The 6-4 Moncrief was routinely among the Bucks’ best rebounders; even led the team in two of those seasons. Bigs – even those as unremarkable as Mokeski – had license to shoot from the perimeter, though the 3-ball, which was introduced to the NBA in 1979-80, remained a novelty. (Criss, meanwhile, was free to be a 5-8 pest.)
Part of the problem was that the Bucks were forever looking for a center. They squeezed some good play out of Bob Lanier, who was nearing the end of the line, and took late-career flyers on Jack Sikma and Dave Cowens as well. But in acquiring Cowens from the Celtics in 1982, they created an issue at point guard, since they sacrificed their starter at the position, Quinn Buckner.
For a time Nellie tried a shooting guard, Brian Winters, at the point. (Winters once told me that on those nights when the Bucks played the Sixers, he was satisfied if Maurice Cheeks only stole the ball from him once, a testimony to Cheeks’ defensive greatness.)
But as always, Nellie adapted. During the 1984-85 season, he deployed Paul Pressey as a point forward, another move that foreshadowed the present day. There had been great passing forwards before that, just as there have been since, but this was the first time a coach decided to go without a point guard and have a guy who would normally be a wing initiate his offense.
The game was forever changed. No less a coach than Pat Riley told the Houston Chronicle in 2010 that Nelson was “the greatest innovator in the history of the game.” Added Larry Brown in that same piece: “Forever, people in this league will be doing what Nellie did first, and it will never get old.”
Nelson won 1,335 games in 31 years on the bench, which besides his 11 years in Milwaukee included 11 with Golden State (over two stints) and eight with Dallas. Also one with the Knicks, though he quickly left town when it became clear Patrick Ewing wasn’t thrilled with his idiosyncratic ways. The only coach to win more games than Nelson was Gregg Popovich (1,390), and in 2012 Nellie made the Hall of Fame.
He never sniffed a title as a coach, though he won five as a lunchpail forward with the Celtics in the 1960s. His lasting legacy is his ability to look at things that never were and ask, why not?
He coached the Run TMC Warriors, whose best lineup included not only Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond and Chris Mullin – hence the TMC – but Sarunas Marciulionis and Rod Higgins. Buncha mites, as Wilbur “Shooter” Flatch, of “Hoosiers” fame, would say.
In Nellie’s second go-round with the Dubs, he threw out similarly unconventional quintets (Baron Davis, Monta Ellis, Jason Richardson, et al.), with the high point being when Golden State’s “We Believe” club knocked off the top-seeded Mavericks in the ‘07 postseason.
Those Mavs were led by Dirk Nowitzki, who Nelson helped unlock while in Dallas a few years earlier. To that point, who had heard of a 7-foot guy gunning from deep? Nelson offered that freedom, just as he had elsewhere. (That approach was somewhat less successful when Nelson gave Manute Bol the green light in Golden State.)
In Dallas Nelson also coached Steve Nash, who while playing for Mike D’Antoni in Phoenix a few years later supercharged the advance toward the pace-and-space style of play seen so often today. Certainly the influx of European players has hastened that transition as well.
But Nelson unquestionably had his place in that. He last coached in 2010, and three years later Chris Ballard of Sports Illustrated visited him on Maui, where he had happily retired. The resulting story was brilliantly constructed, painting a picture of a guy who played all-night poker games with the likes of Willie Nelson and Woody Harrelson (a game that on one occasion continued after one of the players died), gave up Miller Lite but grew his own marijuana (and doubtlessly indulged) and just generally seemed content with how the years had unspooled before him.
“I try to live in the now,” he told Ballard. “The past really doesn’t interest me that much.”
But in his case, the past was precedent. It set the stage for the game as it is, advanced the sport in an entirely different direction. Yes, he had his detractors. And yes, he had his missteps. (Manute from downtown? Seriously?) But other than that, pretty solid legacy for Nellie.