Better Coaching... or Less Coaching?

The updated numbers at left reflect the Warriors' incremental improvements of late. After a long spell as the 28th-best team in the NBA, we now rate as maybe the 24th. Our rebounding totals, though still the worst in the league, no longer project to be the worst in league history. We've even climbed out of the basement in eFG% allowed, finally passing the lowly Nets over the weekend. If you're looking for green shoots, you can find a few.

The narrative being advanced by the team and its adherents is that those green shoots are due to Don Nelson... that our recent solid play springs primarily from some inspired coaching. As some would have it, Don Nelson has cobbled together some competitive units, through Scotch tape, bubble gum and a heapin' helpin' of genius.

This narrative is not only not true, it is the diametric opposite of true. You can not get farther away from the truth than this narrative is. If the truth resides here on Earth, this narrative is pushing against the farthest edge of the universe with all its might, braving spacetime distortions, straining to get that little bit further away. This narrative is some straight-up bullshit. For we have not been playing better because Don Nelson has creatively worked past our injuries. We have been playing better because injuries have prevented Don Nelson from creatively screwing us up.

When it comes to offensive and defensive structure, Nellie's approach has been laissez-faire throughout this second tenure with the Warriors, and it is comically so now. He wants his players to force the issue offensively... other than that, he pretty much lets the chips fall where they may. He has not been micro-managing either on offense or defense. Which means that the primary dimension in which his coaching affects us is in his lineup choices: who he plays, with whom, and when.

And he's been horrible at every aspect of that decision-making process for a year and a half now. He has not been good at figuring out which players to use: he has overused bad players (Crawford, Mikki, Vlad), underused good ones (Randolph, Wright), and overplayed his headliners (Jack, Monta). He has aligned players in ways that were clearly doomed to fail -- smallball in general, Maggette at the four in particular. And he has used especially poor alignments late in games, when teams have grown accustomed to facing our small lineups, and when every rebound is critically important.

We've gone 42-82 since the beginning of last season. And our two most competitive stretches in that time -- the latter stages of last year and the last month of this one -- have come when we've been beset with injuries. That's not an accident. Because when our bench is shortened to the point of absurdity, Nellie doesn't have the leeway to get cute. And when our short bench features only bigger players, as it does right now, he's forced to play normal-sized lineups that have a better chance.

We're not playing decent basketball right now because Nellie's turning lemons into lemonade. We're playing decent basketball because injuries have pushed Nellie out of the picture altogether. Thanks to injuries, we've been giving heavy minutes to four of our best players -- Monta, Maggette, Biedrins and Curry -- at positions they're big enough to defend. Those guys are good enough to put up a fight most nights, and without CJ or Morrow around, Nellie hasn't been able to undermine their efforts by going small.

It's a bitter irony for a formerly great coach at the end of the line: the creativity that had made him great now makes him terrible. Don Nelson has used extreme strategies for the vast majority of the last two seasons... they have failed, almost without exception. And our brief moments of sunshine have only come when circumstances have forced him to 1) play our best players, 2) play normal-sized lineups, and 3) stay out of the way. You could literally teach a monkey to do that.

For most of his career, Don Nelson truly has been great; he has turned mountains of chicken shit into chicken salad. And I'll be glad to see him get his record, as his decades of brilliant work merit more recognition than they've often received. But the genius that guided his first 1,200+ wins has come unhinged from the basic basketball realities that informed it. The guy's wild ideas are now purely detrimental. And the less he coaches, the better we do.