Few athletes in history are more closely connected to a particular franchise than Jerry West is with the Los Angeles Lakers, even if the relationship went sour toward the end.
As such, the Lakers will wear a black No. 44 band — the number that West wore during his 14 years as a Lakers player — on the left shoulder of their jerseys this season in honor or West, who died in June at the age of 86.
This isn’t a one-game thing. The Lakers will wear the band for all 82 regular-season games and presumably any postseason games for which the team qualifies. West deserves it. He was one of the greatest players in franchise history as well as a former coach and supremely successful executive.
West, a 14-time All-Star and 12-time All-NBA selection who ranks 25th on the NBA’s all-time scoring list, led the Lakers to nine Finals appearances and one championship as a player. He remains the only player to be named Finals MVP from the losing team; that’s how dominant he was in the Lakers’ seven-game loss to the Celtics in 1969, when he averaged 37.9 points and 7.4 assists.
After a short coaching stint that saw him lead the Lakers to the 1977 Western Conference finals, West was named general manager in 1982 and proceeded to build the Showtime Lakers that won four of the team’s five 1980s championships.
West then became the architect of a second dynasty, signing Shaquille O’Neal and coach Phil Jackson and making perhaps the greatest trade in modern NBA history by sending Vlade Divac to the Charlotte Hornets in exchange for the draft rights to Kobe Bryant in 1996. Four years later, West saw those Lakers win the first of their three consecutive championships — his sixth as an executive with the team — in 2000 before he left the franchise.
