SAN ANTONIO — Paul Westhead had a coaching career like none other.
He won an NBA championship as coach of the Los Angeles Lakers in 1980. He won a WNBA championship as coach of the Phoenix Mercury in 2007. And at the college level, his 1989-90 Loyola Marymount team that was led by Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble remains the highest-scoring squad in NCAA Division I history.
Add it up, and that’s achievement. And the National Basketball Coaches Association celebrated his work on Friday, when it announced the 87-year-old Westhead as this year’s recipient of the Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award.
It will be formally presented at Game 2 of the NBA Finals in San Antonio on Friday night.
Westhead was an offensive mastermind, someone whose run-and-gun philosophy changed the game. It didn’t always work during Westhead’s career, but at Loyola Marymount it worked like a charm — his teams led Division I in scoring for three consecutive seasons, with some records that still stand today.
Westhead was an NBA head coach for parts of six seasons — two-plus years with the Lakers, then a one-year stint in Chicago and two-year run in Denver. But that was just one part of many layers of Westhead’s coaching life.
His coaching career spanned parts of six decades, starting with a high school job in the late 1960s in his hometown of Philadelphia. He was head coach for three different men’s college programs (La Salle, Loyola Marymount and George Mason), a women’s college program (Oregon), the three NBA teams, the WNBA’s Mercury, two ABA teams and even a pro team in Japan for one year.
The Daly award honors the memory of the Hall of Famer, who the NBCA said “set a standard for integrity, competitive excellence, and tireless promotion of NBA basketball.”
Past 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), K.C. Jones and Jerry Sloan (2016), Dick Motta (2015), Bernie Bickerstaff (2014), Bill Fitch (2013), Pat Riley (2012), Lenny Wilkens (2011), Jack Ramsay and Tex Winter (2010) and Tommy Heinsohn (2009).
