OAKLAND — Given 36 hours to ponder his decision, Warriors coach Don Nelson had no regrets over benching his franchise player, Baron Davis, for the entire second half of the defeat that formally eliminated Golden State from postseason contention.

"I had a better chance to win that game without Baron Davis, the way that he was playing," Nelson said Wednesday of the Warriors' 122-116 loss in Phoenix on Monday. "That's the way I looked at it. That's a hard win at best. We certainly weren't going to win it the way Baron was playing, so I went with the other guys. I'm glad I did. I would do it again."

Nelson chided the media for frenzied interest a situation he considered a non-issue.

"There's no problem between Baron and I that I know about," Nelson said. "It's really funny to me that such a big issue is made of this. It would be funnier, if it wasn't so sad."

Davis, speaking about the incident for the first time in his postgame press meeting after the Warriors' 126-121 loss to Seattle on Wednesday, admitted that he was "upset" not to get a chance to redeem himself after a 2-for-13 first half, but said there was no rift in his relationship with Nelson.

"Coach did what he thought was best for the team, and I sat there and rooted my teammates on," Davis said. "We talked about it (Wednesday) before I even got to shootaround, we was laughing and joking. Playing for Nellie, you've got to know what comes with it."

Nelson did say that he considered

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bringing Davis back on the floor as the team's lead began to slip away in the final six minutes but decided against it. "Do you take a player who hasn't played and then put the onus on him to win the game for you after a team has played so well?" Nelson said. "I wasn't sure that it was fair at that point. ... And besides that, I thought it was interesting to see different guys in those situations."

What was perhaps more intriguing than Nelson's handling of Davis was his admission that, despite the fact that his team was still mathematically alive in the playoff race, he had all but given up after the Warriors' head-to-head loss against Denver last week.

"I went into the game assuming that I was going to play (the Warriors' core members) about 24 minutes," Nelson said.

OFF THE GLASS: Forward Austin Croshere, the team's ranking veteran, said that he would be interested in returning for a 12th NBA season despite being sidelined on four occasions this season, three times with a bad back. "I still want to play, but I'm kind of at the bottom of the totem pole," Croshere said. ... Stephen Jackson, who began the season by serving a seven-game league- mandated suspension, closed it out by winning the team's Community Service Award, named after owner Chris Cohan and his wife, Angela. ... With a final sellout crowd of 19,596, the Warriors set a single-season franchise attendance record with a per-game average of 19,631.