Former Lakers coach Paul Westhead gets lifetime achievement award

Legendary NBA coach Pat Riley is one of the people most associated with the Los Angeles Lakers‘ Showtime dynasty in the 1980s. But some may not know that he wasn’t yet their head coach when they won their first championship of the decade.

In 1980, Paul Westhead was at the helm of the Lakers as they finished 60-22 and powered past the Philadelphia 76ers in the NBA Finals. He replaced Jack McKinney in the early weeks of the season after McKinney was involved in a near-fatal bicycle incident, and he went on to have a long coaching career.

On Friday, just prior to Game 2 of this year’s finals between the San Antonio Spurs and the New York Knicks, Westhead was awarded the Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Basketball Coaches Association.

Westhead started his coaching career in the Philadelphia area, and he became the men’s basketball head coach at La Salle University in 1970. At the time, he was also an English professor who specialized in the works of William Shakespeare.

He came to the Lakers in 1979 as McKinney’s assistant, and from that point on, he would have a successful, if somewhat tortured, journey for the rest of his career. He was fired early in the 1981-82 season when he inexplicably put the brakes on L.A.’s fast-break offense, leading Magic Johnson to ask to be traded after the team got off to an uneven start.

Westhead would later coach Loyola Marymount University while returning to the fast-paced offense he originally implemented with the Lakers. All was going well until Hank Gathers, one of the nation’s very best players, fatally collapsed during a game in March 1990. Westhead left the school shortly afterward.

After a brief stint with the Denver Nuggets and a few others in the NCAA and a couple of minor-league pro leagues, he coached the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury to a league title in 2007. His last coaching job was in 2014 as an assistant with the University of Oregon’s women’s team.

This article originally appeared on LeBron Wire: Former Lakers coach Paul Westhead gets lifetime achievement award