Don Nelson at the 2025 NBA Finals Credit: Alonzo Adams-Imagn Images via Reuters Connect
By Megan Armstrong on

Last year, Joseph Bien-Kahn penned the definitive Don Nelson profile for The Believer.

In it, Nelson contemplated his mortality, as excerpted below.

“Then he tells me a story,” Bien-Kahn wrote. “A couple days earlier, he’d woken up early, around 4 a.m., and went out onto his patio. He was watching the stars, but then looked down to read something on his phone. His eyes went out of focus and he looked up again and started feeling dizzy. ‘I asked myself, Am I dying?’ he remembers. ‘Is this how it’s going to be?’

“Nellie was off-kilter, but he felt a sense of euphoria too. ‘I believe that when you die, there’s a lot of good thoughts that go through your brain on your way to that process,” he continues. ‘It’s not necessarily an unhappy situation.’

“Thirty seconds later, the feeling had passed. He was back on his patio, under the island night sky, with a rumor of the Pacific Ocean, still dark, in the distance. ‘It didn’t happen, but it would have been a wonderful experience if I’d had to go through it,’ Nellie tells me. ‘If that’s the way it’s gonna go, I’d be all right.'”

Nelson, 86, died peacefully on Sunday, Aug. 9.

“On Sunday morning our beloved husband, dad, grandfather and great-grandfather Don Nelson peacefully went to be with the Lord, surrounded by his loving family,” the Nelson family said in a statement, per ESPN. “Throughout his last week, friends and family encircled him with love, sharing the blessing of his friendship and revisiting treasured memories.”

Nelson spent 45 of his 86 years in the NBA, 14 as a player and 31 as a head coach. He won five championships as a forward for the Boston Celtics, and then he became the NBA’s all-time winningest coach with the Milwaukee Bucks, Golden State Warriors, New York Knicks, and Dallas Mavericks. Nelson now sits second on that list behind Gregg Popovich.

Nelson walked away from coaching — and, subsequently, public life — in 2010, and he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2012.

But even as he enjoyed his twilight years in Hawaii, Nelson’s impact on the basketball world ran deep, as evidenced by the outpouring of tributes. See how the sports media reacted below.

— TheWarriorsTalk (@TheWarriorsTalk) August 9, 2026

About Megan Armstrong

Since first getting published as a student by the Kansas City Star in 2013, Megan Armstrong has gone wherever curiosity and stories have taken her, specializing in sports, media, music, and culture coverage. She also has an extensive background in interviewing and profiling public figures. Her work has appeared in Billboard, Boardroom, Bleacher Report, Esquire, GQ, GRAMMY.com, NYLON, Newsweek, Teen Vogue, The Hollywood Reporter, UPROXX, and elsewhere.

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