He calls me 'The Durango Kid' (2024)

It was around 11 p.m. on a Sunday night in the spring of 2022 and I was sitting on my couch in El Paso, Texas, absolutely livid on Paul Westhead’s behalf.

I had just finished another episode of HBO’s drama series, Winning Time, based on the 1979-80 Los Angeles Lakers that won the NBA championship. Westhead famously led the team to the title after taking over early in the season for Jack McKinney, who was injured in a bicycle wreck. But rather than give Westhead credit for not only holding down the fort, but winning it all, HBO instead had Jason Segel portray Westhead as something of a bumbling idiot, a man who needed then-assistant coach Pat Riley to hold his hand through every aspect of his job as the head coach.

By his own admission, Westhead had what can best be described as a roller coaster ride of a coaching career. Still, the top lines of his résumé really pop off the page and there were some key facts about Westhead that HBO chose to change, ignore, or omit entirely, in favor of adding to the show’s drama.

Westhead is the only person in the history of planet Earth to win both an NBA championship and a WNBA championship. He led one of college basketball’s most famous Cinderella March Madness runs at Loyola Marymount and even coached Kobe Bryant’s father, Joe “Jellybean” Bryant, at La Salle in the mid-1970s. Most importantly, he helped revolutionize offensive basketball in the late-1980s with a wild fastbreak attack, of which some principles are still used today. I was around him almost every day for two years; even if he was, by his own admission, “a little bit crazy,” the man is the most brilliant basketball mind I’ve been privileged to learn from and be around.

Yet and still, here was HBO, acting like Paulie W was basketball’s Homer Simpson. By many accounts, it was an unfair portrayal and one that Westhead told me was, “95% fiction,” when I spoke to him about it earlier this summer.

“For better or worse, it wasn’t me,” Westhead said over the phone from his home in Los Angeles. “If you weren’t in (the show), and I was, it was kind of interesting, an adult soap opera with good characters, for what it’s worth.”

Winning Time was no doubt a popular show for HBO and it did at least go to the trouble of playing a disclaimer before each episode, telling viewers that some details had been changed and not everything in the program was completely accurate. An English teacher on the side early in his coaching days, up until the time he left La Salle in 1979, Westhead would often quote Shakespeare to his players. There’s no doubt that he’s a fan of good prose and storytelling. Regardless, for Westhead, some of the creative liberties taken by HBO were a step - or three - too far.

“If you’re going to make a series, you want to do things to have an audience and keep an audience. On that level, they did a decent-to-good job,” said Westhead. “On the truth and reality level, I probably know best about me and for other characters; they had no regard for truth.”

He then recounted one scene where Pat Riley, played by Adrien Brody, drags Segel-as-Westhead into a hotel shower, fully clothed, and tells Westhead to grow up and get his act together as head coach. It’s a scene that, “never actually happened in real life,” Westhead told me, laughing. Always a pretty easy-going guy, he’s very much at peace with how his coaching career played out across almost 50 years and multiple continents.

I cold-called Westhead on a Monday afternoon, planning on leaving a message to set up a time for a full interview.

Instead, he answered on the second ring and after I quickly explained why I was calling him, Westhead said he would speak with me right then and there. For almost an hour, we went over basically every step of his basketball career. Coach is 85 years old, but sharp as ever and exactly as I remembered him, six years removed from our last in-person encounter in June of 2018.

I met Westhead in the spring of 2011, when he was wrapping up his second season as the head coach of the University of Oregon’s women’s basketball team. I was finishing my sophom*ore year of college and had recently discovered a pretty cool way to get involved in intercollegiate athletics: being a practice player for the women’s basketball program.

It’s a fairly common occurrence across collegiate women’s basketball; teams will seek out male students on campus to serve as the scout team for the ladies, much like an NFL practice squad. The male practice teams at South Carolina under Dawn Staley and at UConn under Geno Auriemma have been featured in major publications like ESPN in recent years. They’re there to help with whatever the coaches and players need, whether that’s running the next opponent’s schemes, helping to facilitate drills at practice each day, or coming in after hours to rebound for players wanting to get some extra work in.

A mutual friend introduced me to three members of the Ducks’ practice squad: Nick Adam, Kyle Hinstorff and Drew Muscatell. After multiple discussions regarding joining the team over the course of a few months, Muscatell finally relented and invited me to a pick-up game at the arena with the ladies and the practice boys to gauge how I would fit in. I apparently did enough to prove that I could be of service, because I was soon told that I would be a part of the squad for the 2011-12 season.

I was briefly introduced to Westhead before we played that first day; it’s safe to say that I was nervous and I laughed when he looked at my skinny, 6’5 frame and said something about the “Scrubs” finally getting some real height. I told him I was from Durango, Colo., and he immediately began calling me The Durango Kid, after the old Western movies.

That’s right; the man who had coached Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to their first NBA championship together had endearing nicknames for everyone in his life, from his children to NBA players and his Oregon athletes, on down to the practice boys. We were collectively dubbed The Scrubs, but each of us had our own personalized nicknames, too. I was the Durango Kid; Michael Franzone was Mike McSpike, later shortened to just Spike; Nick Adam was Nick the Quick, or sometimes Nick the Trick; and Kyle Hinstorff was Sconbon, because he was from Wisconsin.

Months later, I showed up to the first pre-season practice in early-September having spent the summer getting in the best shape of my life and educating myself on the Oregon team, as well as Westhead’s famed fastbreak system that set what are likely unbreakable NCAA scoring records at Loyola Marymount.

As a huge basketball fan, I knew about Paul Westhead years before we ever crossed paths.

At nine years old, I watched a documentary about legendary NBA Finals series. One of the main matchups that was featured was the 1980 NBA Finals between Westhead’s Los Angeles Lakers and the Philadelphia 76ers. The series is famous because it served as Magic Johnson’s arrival as a basketball superstar. Just a 20-year-old rookie that year, Johnson stepped up in the decisive game six of the series, after Abdul-Jabbar badly sprained his ankle in game five and couldn’t play. Johnson moved over from point guard to start the game at center with Kareem out of the lineup, putting together a legendary stat line: 42 points, 15 rebounds, seven assists in a Lakers victory to clinch the NBA championship, on the Sixers’ home court.

For Westhead, the NBA championship wrapped up a whirlwind 365 days. Just one year earlier, he’d been a successful head coach at La Salle, a small Division I college in his native Philadelphia. His old friend and coach from Philly, Jack McKinney, got the Lakers’ head coaching job and brought Westhead from the collegiate ranks to LA with him as an assistant. It was Westhead’s first NBA coaching job; though he took the Explorers to a pair of NCAA Tournaments during his tenure at La Salle, the Lakers were an entirely different galaxy.

“I was the coach of a small college and nothing spectacular was going on at that time,” Westhead said. “One year later, I’m winning the championship against the Sixers, in my hometown, without Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic was doing what he did.”

The true story of how it all fell together for Westhead that season is intriguing enough that he wonders why Winning Time felt the need to alter the truth as much as they did. 13 games into the Lakers’ season, McKinney was almost killed in a bicycle accident, forcing Westhead into the head coach’s chair in place of his good friend and mentor.

All he did from there as a rookie NBA head coach was lead the Lakers to a 60-win championship season, one in which LA never lost more than two games in a row. To this day though, he humbly heaps praise on McKinney.

“When we won the championship, I wasn’t running the fastbreak system, I was running Jack’s Portland Trail Blazer offense,” Westhead said. “So, I don’t want to take a lot of credit for winning a championship with my fastbreak.”

Westhead’s famous, numbered fastbreak style of play is now known only as, “The System.”

It’s one that he initially picked up from Sonny Allen, then crafted to his liking and tried to perfect at each of his coaching stops. He went down to see Allen at SMU and learn the fastbreak style of play from him. Although Allen had just won an NCAA Division II national championship running his version of it at Old Dominion, he cautioned Westhead against it.

“Sonny was the one who had the sketch that I modeled. He said, ‘I’ll show you how to do it, but you have to be a little bit crazy to do this,’” Westhead said. “He knew the downside, getting players to run it fast enough to do it. And I said, ‘I’m crazy enough to do it.’”

The idea for The System was simple enough: play as quickly as possible, shoot as many shots as possible, because the more shots you attempted, he said, the more you would make. Each player was assigned a number relative to their position on the court, with a specific duty. The center, or the “5” would always take the ball out of bounds on made shots and inbound it to the “1,” the point guard. The shooting guard (2) would always run the right lane, the small forward (3) would run the left lane and the power forward (4) would sprint down the middle of the court, right at the rim.

Whether they were taking the ball out from under the basket after a made shot, or rolling out after getting a defensive rebound, Westhead’s teams wanted a shot as quickly as possible, ideally within five seconds, be it a layup, a three-pointer, or something in the midrange.

“The goal was speed dribble and get people open before the defense was set up, simple as that. If you can do it in three seconds, do that,” Westhead said. “We would frequently get 3-on-1 fastbreaks off of made baskets. Today, you only really see that off of turnovers.”

After getting the blueprints to The System from Allen, Westhead experimented and tweaked it at La Salle with Michael Brooks and Jellybean Bryant in the mid-1970s. Per Westhead, Kobe’s father was ahead of his time; at 6’10, he was the type of mobile big man that Westhead preferred, and he told me that the elder Bryant would fit in well in today’s NBA.

He then tried versions of The System with the Lakers after the 1980 championship campaign, but he butted heads with Magic Johnson over it and lost his job early in the 1981-82 season, giving way to Pat Riley. Riley of course won four more NBA titles in the 1980s running his variation of the fastbreak, dubbed “Showtime.”

Westhead tried another early version of his system again the next season with the Chicago Bulls but won only 28 games and was fired after just one year. Out of coaching for a couple of seasons after that, he got another chance and chose to truly go all-in on the fastbreak style when he got hired to coach the Loyola Marymount men’s basketball team in 1985.

For years in my own mind, I’ve credited Westhead for being decades ahead of the curve of offensive basketball. To me, he was running an early version of the “pace-and-space” style of play that is popular in the modern NBA, which prioritizes maximizing every angle on the court as quickly as possible and results in a high number of three-point attempts by design.

However, Westhead doesn’t necessarily agree that he played a part in revolutionizing offensive basketball. He was adamant that running his system was the best way to do things when he was coaching and said that he’d still try to do it if he was still in the game. In the NBA and college these days, though, he said he’s not sure if running The System full-stop would work.

“It’s similar, but it’s not the same. Looking at the NBA now, I don’t see a lot of teams speed dribbling down the court. They shoot a lot of threes and one of the spins of my system was to shoot a lot of threes but that wasn’t the goal,” said Westhead. “The team that I saw in the last month try to do (the speed dribble) was the Indiana Pacers. They tried to advance the ball very quickly, but I wouldn’t say they were running what I ran. There’s a big difference and I don’t want to take any credit.”

I asked Westhead what his best teams that truly “got” The System had in common. Talent helps a lot of course, but getting players to buy in fully was always the toughest task. Any time that he got that complete acceptance from his teams, success followed.

“You need certain types of players that can commit to running as hard as they can, over and over and over again,” Westhead said. “I don’t know if that’s the way basketball has evolved, if players want to play that way anymore. It’s really hard to sell. They have to see the value of running faster than they’re accustomed to.”

The numbers from Westhead’s best fastbreak teams pop off the stat sheet. Though the Lakers weren’t yet running Westhead’s full system, they still scored 115 and 111 points per game, respectively, in 1979-80 and 1980-81.

His 2007 Phoenix Mercury squad that won the WNBA championship with Diana Taurasi ran The System and led the league in 11 categories, including points per game (89.0), field goals made (31.3) and attempted (71.1) per game, as well as field goal percentage (43.9%), three-pointers made (8.3) and attempted (23.6) per game, and assists per game (20.1, an assist on 64% of their made field goals).

Most famously, Westhead’s LMU teams led the NCAA in scoring in 1988 (110.3 points per game), 1989 (112.5), and 1990 (122.4), while allowing 97.2, 107.3 and 108.1 points per game, respectively, in each of those seasons. The 122.4 points LMU scored per game in 1990 is still the NCAA record. With how college basketball has changed over the last 35 years, it’s hard to see how that mark will ever get broken.

Westhead’s LMU teams as far back as 1987 were already shooting at least nine more three-pointers per game than their opponents, a strategy that was clearly well-ahead of its time, even if shooting a high volume of three-pointers wasn’t entirely Westhead’s intended goal.

Defense wasn’t as optional as the opponents’ points per game might say. Westhead wasn’t completely averse to that side of basketball, employing a full court, trapping defense to try to create turnovers (LMU forced at least 20 opponent turnovers per game from 1987-90), leading to more shots and points for his team, even if there were some wild scores.

Most importantly, Westhead’s LMU teams won a lot. The Lions put together a record of 74-21, with three straight NCAA Tournament appearances from 1987-90. The Lions’ style of play was also tough in the postseason. Westhead and LMU upset Wyoming in the first round in 1988, then went on a magical ride to the Elite Eight in 1990, a run that is still honored and celebrated three-and-a-half decades later. He told me during our chat that LMU was his favorite team that he ever coached, the squad that best assimilated to The System.

“They did the speed game almost to perfection. They lived that; they knew no other way. If anything changed, they played it a little faster,” said Westhead.

The stars of those Loyola teams were Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble.

You simply can’t tell Westhead’s story without them. Like Westhead, they were Philly natives and high school teammates at Dobbins Tech. They both started their careers at USC, before transferring to play for Westhead at LMU. It was a match made in heaven; no two players have ever fit in with Westhead and acquiesced to The System like Gathers and Kimble did. They bought in completely and helped get buy-in from the rest of the team. Failure simply wasn’t an option.

Gathers had an incredible junior season in 1988-89, leading the nation in scoring and rebounding at 32.7 points per game, along with 13.7 rebounds. But during a game against UC-Santa Barbara early in his senior season, Gathers collapsed on the court and was eventually diagnosed with an abnormal heartbeat.

He was on heart medication and tried to play through it, but the medication impaired his ability to be at the top of his game (though he did still average 29 points and 10.8 rebounds that year). In his stead, Kimble had the best season of his college career, leading the nation in scoring at 35.3 points per game en route to being named an All-American.

Gathers didn’t like the way the medication made him play and doctors steadily lowered his daily dosage as the season went along after he complained. He began playing like himself late in the year, but in doing so he was careening towards a tragic outcome.

On March 4, 1990, in the semifinals of the West Coast Conference Tournament vs. the University of Portland, Gathers slammed home an alley-oop dunk in front of Pilots guard Erik Spoelstra (more on him and Westhead in a bit), then ran to his spot in the Lions’ full-court press. Seconds later, he collapsed on the court in front of his family, friends and thousands of fans. He soon stopped breathing and was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead a short time later at just 23 years old.

The WCC canceled the rest of the conference tournament, rewarding LMU the automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament by virtue of winning the regular season title. Westhead and the Lions had a choice to make; forego March Madness and end the season prematurely, or play for Hank in the Big Dance. Quickly, they decided that Hank would have it no other way than to play.

The Lions were awarded an 11-seed in the West region that year. They upset 6-seed New Mexico State in round one, as Kimble famously drilled two big free throws left-handed in the second half in honor of Gathers, who shot his free throws left-handed. It’s a legendary March Madness moment that still gets played in highlight reel montages 34 years later.

First round win secured, LMU then got a date with defending national champion Michigan in round two. In a game that Westhead says is one of his favorites ever as a coach, the Lions ran the Wolverines out of the gym, 149-115. Jeff Fryer dropped 41 points, hitting an NCAA Tournament-record 11 three-pointers; Kimble added 37 points and Terrell Lowery poured in 23 points off the bench. Westhead and the Lions were the feel-good story of the tournament and heading to the Sweet 16.

LMU then grinded out a two-point win over Robert Horry and Alabama to punch a ticket to the Elite Eight, where they ran into the eventual national champion UNLV Runnin’ Rebels. A 131-101 defeat that day could do little to damper the soul of that LMU run; the magical two weeks in Gathers’ honor will live on forever in college basketball lore.

After that, Westhead got another chance in the NBA for two seasons with the Denver Nuggets, but won just 44 total games. He returned to the collegiate ranks at George Mason from 1993-97 and went 38-70. From there, he became something of a coaching journeyman over the next eight years, spending time in the ABA, Japan and as an NBA assistant coach, before taking the Phoenix Mercury job and winning the 2007 WNBA championship with players like Cappie Pondexter and Taurasi that bought in to what Westhead was buying. He’s said for years that the Mercury were also one of his favorite teams he ever coached.

In 2009, the same year I started school at the University of Oregon, Westhead took the job as the head coach of the Oregon women.

“Down that lane, Durango!”

I was midway through my first workout with the Ducks and I was just trying not to screw up the drills. I alternated freely with the post players at the 4 and 5 spots when they needed a rest, but I wasn’t running The System quite like Coach expected just yet - and really, the jury is still out on whether or not I ever did. But no matter if it was a star player, or a new practice boy, no one was safe from being coached hard by Westhead.

Heading into the 2011-12 season - Westhead’s third with the Ducks - Oregon was at a bit of a crossroads with its experiment with the Guru of Go at the helm. In his first season, Taylor Lilley and Micaela co*cks led the Ducks to an 18-16 record and the WNIT, all while finishing second in the NCAA in scoring at 81.4 points per game.

But in 2010-11, a rash of injuries doomed the Ducks to a 13-17 season, while their points per game average dropped to 15th nationally. Westhead and his staff brought in what was thought to be a solid recruiting class for 2011-12, pairing six new freshmen with veterans like Jasmin Holliday, Nia Jackson and Amanda Johnson. Hopes were high for a turnaround season and perhaps even a return to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2005.

There was plenty of first-day excitement to go around and coach still had energy and enthusiasm for his style of play. He had his hands in a lot of different aspects of practice, getting fastbreak drills up and running, passing to the ladies during shooting drills and he always kept things moving to his liking. He had a dry sense of humor and would frequently take friendly stabs at anyone in his line of sight about their game, but he especially seemed to enjoy getting on the practice boys. It was always in jest, but they were the kind of jabs that could make you second-guess yourself if you didn’t know any better.

He had nicknames for all of the practice boys - The Scrubs - but it of course extended to the ladies, too, and was almost always a play on their names. Amanda Johnson - our star post player - was simply AJ; sophom*ores Danielle Love, Deanna Weaver and Ariel Thomas were D-Lo, D-Weav and AT, respectively. On and on it went, down to the managers and the trainer, Tori “T-Money” Noda. It helped familiarize everyone with each other and made you feel like a part of the team. 12 years later, I don’t remember the last time I referred to any of them by their first names.

Westhead wasn’t immune to receiving a nickname either; we’ll always affectionately refer to him as Paulie W. However, to his face I’ve never called him anything other than Coach or Coach Westhead. He allowed us to play music at practice, as long as The Beatles were somewhere in the rotation, preferably Hey Jude.

There were two big rules to understand in order to be a Scrub. First and most importantly, don’t injure the players; second, we were there for them every day to make sure they were getting better, and practice was never, ever supposed to be about us.

The Scrubs were tasked with running the scout team offense and defense for the next opponent that the ladies would face. We also had our own lineup of five players, and we were assigned positions. Drew Muscatell - the son of then-Ducks assistant coach Dan Muscatell and now a basketball coach himself at the University of Idaho - was the point guard and ran the Scrubs like he was our coach. Nick Adam, Michael Franzone and Ryan Trutner alternated at the 2 and 3 spots, Kyle Hinstorff was the 4 and I was the 5.

All of us were decent-to-good high school basketball players; some of us probably could have played college ball at a small school, but largely, we were just a bunch of guys that loved basketball and enjoyed being around a team again. We even played together on an intramural team at Oregon, running The System with a lot of success against teams that weren’t ready for our pace. One year, we even designed Scrubs jerseys in Loyola Marymount colors that we wore for our intramural games.

Ultimately, the Scrubs became the most influential team I’ve ever been a part of. Hinstorff and Muscatell are my best friends to this day and we’re all still in contact with quite a few players, coaches and staff members from the team.

How exactly are you supposed to replicate the skillset of the future number one pick in the WNBA Draft?

That was my conundrum in the winter of 2012 when I was asked on a few different occasions by Westhead to play the practice role of then-Stanford Cardinal star, Nneka Ogwumike. During the height of the Pac-12 season, the Scrubs would have to replicate the schemes of top-25 opponents, including the California Golden Bears, Stanford and UCLA Bruins. Multiple times, I was asked to play the practice role of future WNBA stars like Ogwumike. Although I tried, it’s safe to say that I didn’t exactly do her game justice; after all, she did win the 2016 WNBA MVP.

We would also help out with various individual drills. I’d had a late growth spurt - from 5’6 as a junior in high school to around 6’5 by the time I was a junior in college - so I actually learned how to play post defense by doing so against the Oregon women every day. Westhead of course wanted his team to be as prepared as possible, so it wasn’t uncommon for him or another coach to stop a workout to ensure that I or another Scrub were doing things like we were supposed to.

I wanted to be as helpful as I could be for the greater good of the team, so no matter what, I was going to listen to anyone who told me to do something at practice. But whenever Westhead would come over to coach me up about something, no matter how small, or if he was upset with me, I always listened and immediately applied it. How many people can say that they were coached by a guy that won an NBA championship with Kareem and Magic? Even if his coaching focus wasn’t truly on me, I was going to soak up every bit of knowledge from him that I could.

There was also an adjustment period, getting used to Westhead’s basketball lingo. Picks were called, “gets,” and Westhead would always yell, “run a get!” if the fastbreak didn’t work. It was his way of letting the team know to initiate a set offensive play. To this day if I call Hinstorff or Muscatell, there’s a good chance one of us will yell, “run a get!” out of the blue at some point, for no reason other than to have a laugh and pay tribute to Coach Westhead.

There was very little down time for anyone - player, coach, manager or Scrub - during Westhead’s practices. Westhead preferred things in his life like he preferred his basketball: he wanted everything to be done quickly, so that’s how they were done.

A staple of Westhead workouts were what he called, “cycles.” Multiple times per practice, we’d line up 5-on-0 and each group of five players would run The System to engrain its intricacies into our minds. One cycle meant one trip down the court and back to the starting point. Two cycles meant two down-and-backs. We finished practice each day with a timed two-and-a-half cycles, or five trips up and down the court. This meant that each player would get the chance to shoot the ball, with the trail-5 taking the final shot from the top of the key. All of it had to be completed in under 25 seconds and required all five players to work together like a well-oiled machine. If one group didn’t finish the drill by the time the buzzer sounded, everyone would have to do it again.

Depending on the day, we might run cycles three or four times, in between the other various, five-on-five drills that Westhead had the team do. Those were almost always against a full-court defense, practicing against different situations as quickly as possible. It was great conditioning, which meant we rarely had to do anything extra after practice. As a result, all of us were in phenomenal shape - I had a six-pack for two years without ever lifting weights or doing sit-ups and push-ups.

One cold day in November of 2011, I walked in to practice and saw the head coach of the Miami Heat sitting in the corner.

The NBA’s players were currently on strike, so Erik Spoelstra had some extra time to get his ducks in a row, as it were. A highlight of Westhead’s practices were the basketball dignitaries that would show up every now and then to watch The System in action. We had gotten sort of used to the likes of Bo Kimble or Corey Gaines dropping in, but a sitting NBA head coach was exciting for everyone.

You have to remember that in the fall of 2011, Spoelstra wasn’t thought of as the basketball mastermind that he’s considered to be now in 2024. He and the Heat were fresh off an embarrassing loss in the NBA Finals to the Dallas Mavericks. Miami had signed LeBron James and Chris Bosh in the summer of 2010 and paired them with Dwyane Wade, with the promise of many championships to come. But the loss to Dallas had shaken everything up; it’s still probably the lowest point of James’ incredible career and Spoelstra was firmly on the hot seat.

As such, Spoelstra was on the hunt for any kind of strategy or advantage that he could find to best-utilize James and Wade’s unique skillsets in the open court. So, the Oregon native and former University of Portland basketball player that was just a few feet away from Hank Gathers when he died in 1990, hopped on a plane to come learn from his old West Coast Conference nemesis, Paul Westhead.

Spoelstra no doubt had as good an idea as anyone what The System could do to opponents when it was run to perfection, but he needed to see it in person as a coach. So, he sat in the corner of our practice for two hours, watching intently and taking furious notes while the Oregon women and the Scrubs ran Westhead’s fastbreak.

“He knew what the deal was, but one of his reasons for coming to practice was to see some of the drills, to see how we approached it,” said Westhead.

Any time there was a water break, Westhead would go over and speak to him, offering explanations for what we had just run and pointers for how Spoelstra could utilize The System with his personnel. It was pretty intriguing to all of us, the idea of LeBron in Coach Westhead’s speed game and also commendable that Spoelstra would think to come learn it from Westhead and implement it, or at least parts of it.

“I think he realized that he could put in, but to give him credit, he probably felt that he could use some things, but he wasn’t going to go in whole-hog I don’t think. He was too smart for that,” Westhead said with a laugh. “If you do that in the pros and it doesn’t work, your players will go sideways on you. The irony is that when you buy into it, it’s the best thing you’ve ever done, you win, and no one can beat you. But you don’t know that until you do it.”

A few days later, the NBA strike ended and on Christmas Day, 2011, the season began with a bang. Spoelstra and the Heat opened the campaign with a road rematch at the defending champion Mavericks, but it was clear that something was different with Miami. They were getting up and down the court, filling the lanes and running a highly effective, up-tempo game, to the tune of 31 fastbreak points in the season opener. Home for the holidays, I leaned over to my dad: “Pops, they’re running The System!”

There it was, clear as day, The System in an NBA game, being executed at a high level by the best player in the world. Like Westhead said, Miami wasn’t only running The System, but it certainly seemed to be a decent chunk of the gameplan. Miami scored over 115 points in four of its first eight games and in June of 2012, the Heat beat the Oklahoma City Thunder in five games to win the first of back-to-back NBA championships, with James and Spoelstra leading the way.

It later got out in the news that Spoelstra had also spoken to then-Oregon football coach Chip Kelly about playing fast during his trip to Eugene. Kelly’s Ducks truly revolutionized college football at that time with the blur offense, but to us, it was a bit like comparing apples and oranges. To this day, the Scrubs still like to say that The System helped LeBron win his first championship.

Like so many of Westhead’s stops, Oregon brought with it some tough times.

The 2011-12 campaign started with a bang, a 6-0 start to nonconference play, but ended with a whimper and a 15-16 record.

The next season, my senior year, was even worse, as the Ducks went 4-27, averaging just 60.8 points per game, 199th in the nation.

That 2012-13 squad was also the most cursed team I’ve ever been around; six players suffered devastating season-ending injuries. Famously, Westhead went to a Christmas party one night and found out that the daughter of one of the Oregon baseball coaches had played high school basketball. Things were so dire that just days later, she was on a plane headed for Illinois, scoring eight points off the bench in an Oregon loss to the Illini. A few days after that, she was one of eight players to suit up at home, playing 15 minutes in the Ducks’ first win of the season over Fresno State.

The 2012-13 season wasn’t all bad, though. 6’3 freshman post Jillian Alleyne was phenomenal, averaging 13 points and 12 rebounds per game in the Pac-12. She has played in the WNBA at times over the last few years and has carved out a really nice niche for herself overseas as well.

In 2013-14, the season after I had graduated, the Ducks had a bit of a resurgence, leading the nation in scoring (93.2 points per game), going 16-16 and qualifying once again for the WNIT in the final season of Westhead’s contract at Oregon. However, the damage was done and athletic director Rob Mullens made the decision to part ways with Paulie W. At age 75, his coaching career had come to an end.

“I always felt it was possible that we were about to turn the corner, but going through the season, even if I might have been the last to figure it out, we didn’t totally get it,” said Westhead. “We were always a decent running team and, in my system, being decent isn’t good enough. It just doesn’t work. (Going fast) was always my goal and every year I tried my best to pull it off, but we never quite pulled it off (at Oregon).”

Many of the players from those two seasons I was a practice player are still involved in basketball in some form or fashion. Alleyne and Amanda Johnson are still playing professionally around the globe. Amanda Delgado, Katie Gruys, Jasmin Holliday, Nia Jackson, Jordan Loera and Lexi Peterson are all coaching the women’s game at the Division I level.

Westhead acknowledged freely throughout our conversation that The System brought a lot of mixed results: "My fastbreak system is doomed to fail. It's agony and ecstasy," he’s said on multiple occasions. Self-awareness is not something that he lacks.

When it worked, it led to highly successful, beautiful basketball that won championships and was almost impossible for opponents to keep up with and stop. When The System failed, it had the potential to fail badly, and Westhead would get fired. 10 years removed from his last coaching job with the Oregon women, Westhead is at peace with how it all played out.

“I had a career that was clearly topsy-turvy, very high and very low,” said Westhead. “It’s hard to say where I fit (in the history of the game at-large). I had a scheme and for the most part of my career I stuck to it. I’m good with the results. If I took the middle road and ran it halfway and saved my job, I don’t know if I’d be as happy as when I played all out and it really worked.”

He’s done some consulting work, but mostly, Westhead has spent the last decade enjoying retirement and his family.

I last saw him at Drew Muscatell’s wedding in June of 2018, where he got married to one of the women’s basketball managers (her first name is also Drew and she even changed her last name to Muscatell to really mess with the government come tax season). Hinstorff and I served as co-best men that day, but Westhead was the life of the party, dancing with the bride and chattering away with all of us for a few minutes at a time.

When it was my turn, I briefly updated him on what I was doing. I told him that I’d just moved to El Paso, Texas, for a new job and then we snapped a photo. A short time later, he and his wife, Cassie, headed for the door.

“See ya later, Durango Kid,” he said, putting some extra zest on his pronunciation of Durango.

A man who coached Magic and Kareem, won an NBA championship and has done things in basketball that no one else in the world ever has, knows me best by that nickname.

As long as I live, it’ll never get old.