Jerry West Was Basketball’s Greatest Lifer
The Lakers legend, who died at age 86 on Wednesday, was successful at every level of the game.
For much of his playing career, Jerry West’s legacy was synonymous with losses.
Leading up to the 1972 NBA Finals, West had appeared in the championship round seven times without winning once. And though his Los Angeles Lakers did finally get their title that season, beating the New York Knicks in five games, West and the Lakers would lose the rematch the next season — bringing his total defeats in the Finals to eight, still a record today.
As they piled up, the losses famously weighed heavily on West. He was a fierce competitor, one who said he felt more of a sense of relief than anything else when he finally reached the NBA’s mountaintop in 1972. “The last time I won a championship was in the 12th grade,” the then 33-year-old West said after the final buzzer sounded on the Lakers’ win.
All of which is to say, West had a reputation as a brilliant player who fell just short of victory more often than not. Which makes it all the more ironic that West, who died at age 86 on Wednesday, has a good case as the greatest winner in pro basketball history — that is, if we look at his success across multiple different roles during his 64-year career in the game.
Let’s start with West as a player. He still ranks eighth in career NBA points per game (27.0), and is Top-50 in assists per game (6.7). Between the regular season and playoffs, West ranks 14th in total career points, 26th in assists, 19th in made field goals, seventh in made free throws, 40th in triple-doubles and 28th in MVP shares. He was No. 9 in Bill Simmons’ Hall of Fame Pyramid rankings, and 11th on SLAM Magazine’s 500 greatest players list (both of which came out around 2010-ish). Even putting aside the fact that his silhouette is the NBA logo, we’re talking about one of the inner-circle all-time greats here.
We don’t have fancier metrics like RAPTOR for West’s career — they didn’t track steals or blocks, or even break rebounds into offensive/defensive categories, until West’s final NBA season — but we can try to put a number on the total victories West contributed to the Lakers by turning to our old friend Consensus Wins (CW). CW takes Basketball-Reference’s Win Shares and averages it with a team-adjusted version of Estimated Wins Added,1 which is the value-added version of Player Efficiency Rating. Both stats have their pros, and plenty of cons, but the combination gives us a relatively decent estimate of value during the era in which West played.
By that measure, West ranks 21st all-time in total NBA Consensus Wins added between the playoffs and regular season, with 223.6. (That’s a little bit more than Larry Bird and Bill Russell, and a little bit less than Moses Malone and Magic Johnson.) I would personally rank all of those guys a little higher in a proper ranking of all-time players, but more important for our purposes here is how all of those wins as a player interact with his wins in other capacities.
After he retired, West also coached the Lakers for three seasons in the late 1970s, going 145-101 and finishing second in Coach of the Year voting in 1977. And the true greatness of his post-playing career emerged when he became general manager of the Lakers in 1982. Contrary to what you might have seen on HBO, West’s knack for player evaluation and roster construction helped build the Showtime-era Lakers — and maintain their dominance throughout the ‘80s, as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar got older and the team needed to build more and more around Magic Johnson.
West then pulled off another series of coups in the ‘90s, setting up the next Laker dynasty by signing Shaquille O’Neal, trading for a teenage prospect named Kobe Bryant and luring Phil Jackson to L.A. as coach. West left the Lakers after the first of that group’s titles in 2000, embarking on additional career chapters that saw him turn the moribund Grizzlies into a 50-win team, play a role in creating the Golden State Warriors’ 2010s dynasty and help L.A.’s little-brother Clippers win more than the Lakers each of the past four seasons.
All told, West won 153 games as a coach and 1,306 as an executive, giving him nearly 1,500 total wins after his playing career ended. Other players who had a second act in retirement were greater on the court — like Michael Jordan — and others, like Don Nelson, won more off the court, but were far lesser players. Nobody in NBA history can match West’s combination of one of the greatest playing careers ever and one of the greatest post-playing careers ever:
For anyone who hasn’t seen it, I would highly recommend watching Paul George’s interview with West on the Podcast P show from last June. George is probably the best interviewer of anyone in this current crop of players-turned-media personalities, and West has SO many stories from his decades in the game — touching on both his own playing career, with the legends he encountered, and his subsequent years with Kobe and Shaq (and beyond). Even nearing what was, in retrospect, the end, West remembered everything.
That’s why I can only marvel at the long and glorious basketball life West led. More than just The Logo — or that earlier legacy as a multi-time Finals runner-up — West influenced the sport in every way as it entered its modern era, directly molding the NBA’s evolution from a smaller, less popular league to the cultural behemoth we know today. It’s hard to think of anyone being able to craft a career in the game as long and successful as West did ever again.
Filed under: NBA
The team adjustment simply makes sure a team’s EWA adds up to the same total as its WS at the team level. This is done by allocating the residual between total WS and EWA across players in proportion to their share of team minutes.