{"id":402166,"date":"2026-08-10T00:02:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T00:02:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/402166\/"},"modified":"2026-08-10T00:02:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T00:02:08","slug":"photos-iconic-moments-from-don-nelsons-dallas-mavericks-tenure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/402166\/","title":{"rendered":"Photos: Iconic moments from Don Nelson’s Dallas Mavericks tenure"},"content":{"rendered":"

Don Nelson enjoyed plenty of legendary moments throughout his coaching career.<\/p>\n

The “Nellie Ball” creator earned numerous accolades as an NBA head coach, picking up 1,335 victories. Nelson coached the Dallas Mavericks<\/a> from 1997-2005 while juggling general manager duties for the organization. He picked up 339 wins with the Mavericks, second-most in franchise history.<\/p>\n

His time off the court was also intriguing. Some of his best moments included his clown-nosed meet-up with Shaquille O’Neal in 2001 and posing for photos with Dirk\u00a0Nowitzki and Steve Nash in 1998. Nelson died Sunday at the age of 86. <\/a>As the sports world pays tribute to the coaching legend, we take a look back at iconic photos from Nelson’s time in Dallas:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Don Nelson enjoyed plenty of legendary moments throughout his coaching career. The “Nellie Ball” creator earned numerous accolades…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":402167,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[732,102,104,103,88840],"class_list":["post-402166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-article","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-tp-dallas-mavericks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/402167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=402166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}