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but Nellie is the guy that decided how to use AW. His use of AW was nothing short of atrocious.
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I really don't see how Nelson could have handled that particular question any better. After the Boston trade, I can't see that there were any choices open to the Mad Scientist aside from:
A) Starting Antoine Walker at his accustomed power forward spot (a position where he had been an all-star in Boston).
B) Bringing 'Toine off the bench as the 6th man.
C) Starting Walker at an unaccustomed postion, namely at the 3 spot as 'Point Forward'.
Now, the presence of Dirk on our Mavs precluded Nelson starting Walker at power forward, and Nelson determined (probably rightly) that Antawn Jamison was better suited to play as an energy, 6th man than Walker would have been. Consequently, Big Don utilized Walker in the only logical fashion left open for him- playing him at the 3 spot, where the skilled, ball-handling, pass-adept forward could hopefully learn to play away from the basket and initiate the Nelson offense in much the same way that Chris Mullin did for so many years with the Golden State Warriors.
Of course, as we all know, this experiment unfortunately failed, but I see that failure as being more the result of a badly-constructed, redundant roster, rather than as an indictment of Nelson's coaching acumen. Simply put, our 2003-2004 Mavs had too many power forwards on the roster, and we just didn't have enough minutes to parse out to them without playing them out of position. In this sense, Walker, Jamison, Fortson, and Najera were all placed in a dire position of having to change their games in order to fit into our crowded rotation, and as such they were all set up for failure last year. As it happened, Jamison was able to carve out the most successful rotation role from amongst our unfortunate forwards, but that was principally because he ate up all of the bench power-forward minutes that Dirk left open. All the others were forced to play out of position, and it made them all look bad (Fortson at center, Walker at 'point forward', Najera at small forward/center).
In my opinion, Nelson did a pretty gosh-darned good job of utilizing the talent that he had last year, and he did a commendable job of trying to make the disparate pieces of our 03-04 Mavs fit into a coherent rotation, but his efforts were ultimately confounded by the inherently imbalanced, power forward-heavy, constitution of his roster. In this sense, both Nelson's coaching, and the reputations of some of our mis-utilized, redundant players of last season, both ended up looking considerably worse than I believe they deserved to...