Nelson recognized the importance of a player's impact on teammates long before analytics confirmed it. He built innovative basketball teams based on the idea that a player's true value lies in their ability to elevate others.
Nelson understood this decades before anyone had a spreadsheet to prove it. He watched Russell make everyone around him better and stored it away. Nelson didn’t have the data to prove it. He didn’t need it. He built teams around it — point-forwards, three-guard lineups, a 7-footer launching threes — because he understood that a player’s value lived in what he made possible, not what he produced. The first analytics revolution gave basketball the language to challenge inherited thinking about individual players. The next one has to measure the whole sentence.
This article originally appeared on Hoops Hype: He watched Russell make everyone around him better and …
Don Nelson focused on the overall impact a player had on their teammates rather than just individual statistics, emphasizing team dynamics over traditional performance metrics.
Nelson introduced strategies like point-forwards, three-guard lineups, and utilizing tall players for three-point shooting to maximize team effectiveness.
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