How Don Nelson helped usher in the positional revolution

This excerpt from Spaced Out: How the NBA’s Three-Point Revolution Changed Everything You Thought You Knew About Basketball by Mike Prada is reprinted with the permission of Triumph Books. For more information and to order a copy, please visit Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, or TriumphBooks.com/SpacedOut. Copyright ©2022 by Mike Prada.

THE GOLDEN STATE Warriors will forever be the franchise that symbolizes the Spaced Out Era. The overwhelming success of Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Steve Kerr, Kevin Durant, Draymond Green, and the other members of squads in the 2010s ushered in many of the modern NBA’s distinct features. They certainly played their part in this modern era of positional fluidity.

But those Warriors did not strike the first significant blow against the game’s five-position orthodoxy. That honor belongs to the cult favorite team that preceded them by a decade.

With the 2001 zone defense rule and the 2004 crackdown on hand-checking firmly in the rearview mirror, something big was about to happen. It had already begun with several ingenious superstars. In Philadelphia, Allen Iverson scaled the microwave scorer role up to an MVP level. Tracy McGrady and Kobe Bryant were merging the skill sets of all three perimeter positions into an amorphous “giant wing” role. Kevin Garnett and Dirk Nowitzki glued the forward positions back together with their combination of power and finesse. The Suns pierced through the Tao of the dominant big man with sleek dunking machine Amar’e Stoudemire, then pierced it again with point center Boris Diaw. LeBron James was just beginning to break the entire system in Cleveland.

By the fall of 2006, it was only a matter of time before positional ingenuity trickled down to the team level. Non-traditional superstars required non-traditional systems, which required non-traditional pieces to make them, well, non-traditional. Days before the 2006–07 season began, Free Darko’s Nathaniel Friedman coined a new term that would foreshadow the modern game.

The NBA, Friedman posited, was poised for the “March of the Positional Revolution.” It wouldn’t just be individual players defying the five-position structure. Soon, it’d be entire teams and organizations.

“The Positional Revolution has flourished only because it has seen its future reflected in an Organizational Revolution. This is perhaps the next great evolutionary leap—never could there be multiple Garnetts or Nowitzkis roaming the court, but teams could very well conceive of themselves as if liberated by their example. Maybe only one or two players in the league are truly beyond positionality; this does not mean, however, that coaches cannot organize a team as if their entire roster were. Creative combinations and unorthodox dynamics require discarding the anonymity of the Old Basketball Order for a deeper, more personal understanding of a player’s capabilities. What matters most is not finding omnipotent individuals but most effectively distributing the finite resources of those available.”

Friedman predicted that one team would emerge that season to disrupt the game’s positional structure. He was wrong about the specific team, but right on the point itself.

That team was the “We Believe” Golden State Warriors. Their peak was brief. Their divorce was messy. But the game is still feeling the ripple effects of their run today.

They were the culmination of Don Nelson’s three-decade war against the game’s five-position structure.

By now, Nelson’s tenures with Milwaukee, Golden State, and Dallas followed the same pattern: surprising initial success followed by some sort of internal drama that prevented his ideas from earning enough staying power to go from renegade to mainstream. Nelson seemed to relish being a maverick, pun intended. Most of his peers admired him from afar without adopting his ideas up close.

By 2006, though, the Warriors were such a laughingstock that another Nellieball merry-go-round appealed to them. Mullin, now Warriors’ general manager, wooed Nelson for weeks, finally convincing him to return as head coach at the end of August. The Warriors initially floundered, but a midseason trade with the Pacers for Stephen Jackson and Al Harrington spurred a 16–5 finish that snuck them into the playoffs for the first time since Nelson last coached the team in 1994.

As fate would have it, Nelson’s most recent former team awaited as their first-round opponent. Avery Johnson, a feisty former point guard who succeeded Nelson at the end of the 2004–05 season, had transformed Mavericks into a snarling, half-court, defense-first unit. It was hard to argue with the results: Dallas reached the NBA Finals in 2006 and responded to their collapse against Miami with a 67–15 season in 2006–07. Nowitzki, the last holdover of Nelson’s Big 3, largely ditched three-pointers to focus on dominating in the high post and mid-range areas. This more “traditional” version of Dirk ascended to become the league’s first European-born MVP.

Nelson’s Warriors, fittingly, were the antithesis of “traditional.” Their eight-man rotation featured one oversized point guard (Baron Davis), a point-guard-sized shooting guard (Monta Ellis), a classic post-Jordan 6’6” shooting guard (Jason Richardson), three small forwards with different odd skill sets (Jackson, Matt Barnes, and Mickaël Piétrus), a shooting power forward (Harrington), and an undersized center (Andris Biedriņš). Most referred to the Warriors as a “small-ball” team, or even an anarchic one with no positions or structure whatsoever.

They misunderstood the method to the Warriors’ madness. Zoom out, and Golden State had all the elements of a normal team. They paired a superstar (Davis) with a collection of role players who each brought something different to the table. They teamed scorers (Davis, Ellis, Richardson) with role-playing specialists (Barnes, Piétrus, Biedriņš). They had shooters (Richardson, Harrington, Jackson, and Piétrus), playmakers (Davis and Jackson), lockdown defenders (Jackson, Piétrus, and Barnes to a lesser extent), slashers (Davis, Ellis, Barnes), and rebounders (Davis, Biedriņš). They didn’t have a towering big man, but they had tough defenders inside and out (basically everyone except Ellis). They had play-starters (Davis, Jackson) and play-finishers (everyone else). They had microwave scorers (Ellis) and dirty-work specialists (Barnes and Biedriņš). The players who filled those roles just didn’t play the positions typically associated with them.

That meant the Warriors could structure different team hierarchies on each possession. As TNT’s Kenny Smith bellowed at halftime of Golden State’s Game 1 victory in Dallas, “Everything you would want to have, they have, and it works well for them. ... They are everything opposite.” As Friedman predicted, the Warriors embodied the Positional Revolution on a team scale. That made them the perfect foil for a Mavericks team trying desperately to embody the exact opposite.

Many expected the Warriors to challenge Dallas, since they had Nelson and handed the Mavericks three of their 15 regular-season losses. But few expected them to decisively pull off one the greatest upsets in NBA playoff history. After Dallas rallied late in Game 5 to avoid elimination, Golden State ran the No. 1 seed off the floor to win in six games.

The Warriors swarmed Nowitzki on the block, ran the ball down Dallas’ throats, and bypassed the Mavericks’ rugged interior defense with long-range bombs. Their unconventional alignment glitched the Mavericks’ well-drilled system. Johnson tinkered with starting lineups, initially benching his centers for an extra wing player, then reinserting them when that failed. Either way, the Warriors scored easily in transition, collectively shut Nowitzki down, and spread the Mavericks defense out so Davis could break down their slower defenders at will.

Even by Nellie’s standards, the “We Believe” Warriors had a short peak. By the fall of 2008, Davis was a Clipper, Richardson was a Charlotte Bobcat, and Ellis was a franchise pariah after seriously injuring his ankle in an unsanctioned moped accident. But their 2007 run foreshadowed the fundamental reshaping of basketball positions that loomed on the horizon.

Though Nellie lacked the players or temperament to finish the Revolution, he understood three key points before others adopted them as gospel.

First, skill determines one’s position, not size. Just because most shorter players are better dribblers and passers than taller players doesn’t mean that all shorter players are better dribblers and passers than all taller players. Similarly, just because taller players were usually better rebounders, shot blockers, and interior scorers than shorter players doesn’t mean every tall guy is automatically better at those tasks. Size can help guide a coach’s lineup choices and a player’s developmental focus, but it cannot make those decisions for them.

Second, each player’s position must be determined by specific contextual factors like team composition, style of play, and the unique shape of each possession. Positional labels have always been shorthand to some degree. It takes less time to call Michael Jordan a “shooting guard” than a “point guard when he brings the ball up, a small forward when he cuts to the corner, a shooting guard when he faces the basket, and a center when he posts up.” But the growing three-point awakening, 2001’s elimination of illegal defense, and league-wide crackdown on hand-checking has freed (or forced, depending on your point of view) all kinds of players into different spots on the floor. The wider the court, the less a five-pronged labeling convention simplifies.

The third point explains why Nelson’s Warriors inspired the Positional Revolution that followed. Individual player versatility was indeed essential, but successful teams and players manifested that versatility by changing positions within games and sequences. The Warriors didn’t overwhelm the Mavericks because they used five generalists of similar height and weight. They did it with five-man units that arranged the necessary basketball skills in different patterns than their predecessors. They had a versatile team, not just a bunch of versatile players.

That distinction is important to understanding the 2007 Warriors’ decisive defeat in the next round. If “small ball” (or simply “not normal-sized ball”) drove the Warriors’ first-round triumph over the bigger Mavericks, it should have been even more effective against their second-round opponent: the bigger, worse, and even more traditional Utah Jazz. Instead, Utah dispatched Golden State in five games by staying committed to their positional arrangement instead of altering it to match the Warriors’. Even now, “big ball” can work just as well as small ball when performed by the right combination of players.