Legendary Coach Honored
Dual NBA and WNBA Champion Coach Paul Westhead Honored with Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award
Anonymous
Paul Westhead, the only coach to win both an NBA and WNBA championship, was named the 2026 recipient of the National Basketball Coaches Association’s Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award. He was honored ahead of Game 2 of the NBA Finals in San Antonio, where the award was to be formally presented on Friday night. Westhead won the Los Angeles Lakers’ NBA title in 1980 and guided the Phoenix Mercury to the WNBA championship in 2007, and at Loyola Marymount in 1989-90 produced the Division I’s highest-scoring team led by Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble. Across a long career spanning the NBA, WNBA, college basketball, and Japan, he became known for run-and-gun offenses and pushing teams to play at a faster pace. The NBCA credited him with challenging conventional thinking and influencing generations of coaches, while Westhead said the award reflects the players who carried his systems. Earlier in his NBA career, he was dismissed mid-season in 1981-82 after his fast-break approach was slowed.
Key Points
1
Westhead argued that the league should play far faster than the current 24-second shot clock, saying he’d like teams “squeezing off shots just four or five seconds after they got their hands on the ball,” and shared his run-and-gun creed: “First man down, shoot.”
2
Before his NBA success, Westhead combined coaching with teaching, becoming an English professor “who specialized in the works of William Shakespeare,” and he also joined the Lakers after taking over for Jack McKinney, who was involved in a near-fatal bicycle incident.
3
During Westhead’s early Lakers tenure, his mid-season dismissal in 1981-82 was linked to a dramatic slowdown of the fast-break style—so much so that Magic Johnson “ask[ed] to be traded after the team got off to an uneven start.”
4
NBCA president J.B. Bickerstaff said Westhead’s influence reached “far beyond wins and championships,” adding that he “challenged conventional thinking, introduced ideas that were ahead of their time, and influenced generations of coaches across every level of men’s and women’s basketball.”
Sentiment
Mostly PositiveNEGATIVENEUTRALPOSITIVE
Publishers
13
Articles
106
Reach
119
A
AnonymousAuthor
