SAN ANTONIO — Paul Westhead had a training profession like none different.
He received an NBA championship as coach of the Los Angeles Lakers in 1980. He received a WNBA championship as coach of the Phoenix Mercury in 2007. And on the faculty degree, his 1989-90 Loyola Marymount workforce that was led by Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble stays the highest-scoring squad in NCAA Division I historical past.
Add it up, and that is achievement. And the Nationwide Basketball Coaches Affiliation celebrated his work on Friday, when it introduced the 87-year-old Westhead as this yr’s recipient of the Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award.
It is going to be formally introduced at Sport 2 of the NBA Finals in San Antonio on Friday evening.
Westhead was an offensive mastermind, somebody whose run-and-gun philosophy modified the sport. It did not all the time work throughout Westhead’s profession, however at Loyola Marymount it labored like a appeal — his groups led Division I in scoring for 3 consecutive seasons, with some data that also stand as we speak.
Westhead was an NBA head coach for components of six seasons — two-plus years with the Lakers, then a one-year stint in Chicago and two-year run in Denver. However that was only one a part of many layers of Westhead’s teaching life.
His teaching profession spanned components of six a long time, beginning with a highschool job within the late Sixties in his hometown of Philadelphia. He was head coach for 3 totally different males’s faculty packages (La Salle, Loyola Marymount and George Mason), a ladies’s faculty program (Oregon), the three NBA groups, the WNBA’s Mercury, two ABA groups and even a professional workforce in Japan for one yr.
The Daly award honors the reminiscence of the Corridor of Famer, who the NBCA mentioned “set an ordinary for integrity, aggressive excellence, and tireless promotion of NBA basketball.”
Previous recipients are Don Nelson (2025), Rudy Tomjanovich (2024), Rick Adelman (2023), Mike Fratello (2022), Larry Brown (2021), Del Harris (2020), Frank Layden (2019), Doug Moe (2018), Al Attles and Hubie Brown (2017), Okay.C. Jones and Jerry Sloan (2016), Dick Motta (2015), Bernie Bickerstaff (2014), Invoice Fitch (2013), Pat Riley (2012), Lenny Wilkens (2011), Jack Ramsay and Tex Winter (2010) and Tommy Heinsohn (2009).
