[MavKikiNYC]

Nellie for the Hall is tough to defend
10:09 PM CST on Wednesday, February 22, 2006

It's not as if Don Nelson's induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame would disgrace the joint or anything like that. As Hall of Fames go, it's a bigger wreck than all of the rest already.

It's simply that the former Mavericks coach and general manager is now on the ballot for the Hall and could find himself enshrined in Springfield, Mass., later this year.

And I think that would be a mistake.

Nothing personal here. You don't find many better guys to spend time with at the top of the coaching profession than Don Nelson.

And he does have some skins on the wall with those 1,190 victories. He and Pat Riley are the only men named NBA Coach of the Year three times. He took two franchises to conference championship series. He was unquestionably an innovator as a coach.

There is that one gap, though.

In 27 seasons with Milwaukee, Golden State, New York (briefly) and Dallas, Nelson never coached in the NBA Finals.

His best teams in Milwaukee were blocked either by the Dr. J Sixers or the Bird Celtics.

His Warriors teams, though highly entertaining, never made a dent in the postseason, winning just a pair of first-round playoff series.

In Dallas, he rebuilt a franchise that had earned the label of worst in pro sports in the '90s, challenged only by the Los Angeles-St. Louis Rams in terms of winning percentage.

Again, the team's entertainment value exceeded its postseason potential, although the Mavericks reached the Western Conference Finals – Nelson's first team to advance that far in 17 years – in 2003.

Too often, the things that made a Nelson team successful over the course of an 82-game season worked against it in the shorter, more defensively-demanding playoffs.

And one has to look at Avery Johnson's remarkable record since replacing Nelson – 58-13 entering today's game with Memphis – and note that this team has not made dramatic roster changes in the past year other than at the top of the coaching staff.

What Nelson has going for him is that he lasted just about forever in this league, even while battling his own and his wife's bouts with cancer. And he even hinted on a recent radio show that he might take another crack at coaching in the NBA despite enjoying his golden parachute role as a Mavericks consultant.

One way to examine a person's Hall of Fame worthiness, imperfect but sometimes instructive, is to look at who's in and who isn't.

All of the NBA coaches from Nelson's era that are in – Larry Brown, Chuck Daly, Len Wilkens, Jack Ramsay – won NBA titles. Nelson won more games than all but Wilkens.

But the ring is missing.

Dick Motta, who won a title in Washington and built the Mavericks team that John MacLeod coached into the conference finals, is not in the Hall.

Although baseball's and the Pro Football Hall of Fame have come under fire in this space and elsewhere for a variety of reasons, they are no match for the insanity of the Basketball Hall of Fame.

David Moore, longtime NBA writer, was one of the 24 voters for a few years in the '90s. There were no meetings of voters. In fact, he never knew who the other 23 were, and the Hall never instructed him on what criteria to consider.

It's all in the eye of the beholder here, and the people running it don't tell anyone who the beholders are. That makes predicting whether Nelson or anybody else has a good chance to be inducted a total guess.

It's possible that Nelson's five NBA titles as a Celtics player will raise his Hall profile even though he was a good, not great player for Boston.

Maybe Nelson's mistake, if he fails to get in, was never having coached in college. The Hall of Fame, which makes no distinction between pros, colleges, women and foreign players, tilts heavily toward the college game.

Temple's John Chaney – very similar to Nelson with a long history of winning but no Final Four trips – is still coaching. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame five years ago.