BODY OF WORK

NBA's logo dead at 86 after HOF career as player & exec

13 Jun 2024 - New York Post

By DON BURKE - Dburke@nypost.com

Jerry West, whose silhouette was fashioned into the NBA logo and who made tremendous contributions to the game of basketball as a player, a coach and as an executive with several teams, died Wednesday. He was 86.

One of the most complete players to ever play the game, West made the All-Star team in each of his 14 seasons in the league, and while he only won one NBA championship — his Los Angeles Lakers beat the Knicks following the 1970-71 season — it wasn’t for lack of trying. West’s teams appeared in nine NBA Finals and were 1-8, dropping six Finals to the dynastic Boston Celtics and two out of three to the Knicks.

“Those damn Celtics,” West often said. He was named the Finals MVP during one of those losses to the Celtics, the only player from a losing team ever to be so honored.

West also made one of the most memorable shots in NBA history when he let one fly a few strides before midcourt as time expired in regulation in Game 3 of the 1970 Finals. That basket — which hit nothing but net — sent the game into overtime, a game and series the Knicks would eventually win. It was one of the many reasons the 12-time all-NBA selection earned the nickname “Mr. Clutch.”

West was inducted into the Naismith National Basketball Hall of Fame as an NBA player, and, later, as a member of the goldmedal winning 1960 U.S. Olympic team. This year, he’ll be enshrined as a contributor. After coaching the Lakers for three seasons, West became an executive with the team and later with the Memphis Grizzlies, Golden State Warriors and, most recently, the Los Angeles Clippers. As an executive with the Lakers and later as their GM, West was involved in the drafting of Magic Johnson and James Worthy while trading for a teenage Kobe Bryant and, a week later, signing Shaquille O’Neal as a free agent. The Lakers won five NBA titles during his 22-year tenure in the executive suite and, before leaving, he laid the foundation for their three-peat with Bryant and O’Neal.

On Wednesday, NBA commissioner Adam Silver called West “one of the greatest executives in sports history.” “He helped build eight championship teams during his tenure in the NBA — a legacy of achievement that mirrors his oncourt excellence,” Silver said. “And he will

be enshrined this October into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame as a contributor, becoming the first person ever inducted as both a player and a contributor. I valued my friendship with Jerry and the knowledge he shared with me over many years about basketball and life.”

Jerome Alan West was born in Chelyan, West Virginia, on May 28, 1938. By his own telling, he had an unhappy childhood living with an abusive father. The family — West was the second youngest of six children — moved around the area a lot, settling for a time in the town of Cabin Creek. That led to another of West’s nicknames: “Zeke from Cabin Creek.”

He revealed in his 2012 memoir that he suffered from bouts of depression and became a withdrawn teen after the death of an older brother in the Korean War. West’s therapy was basketball, shooting at a rim nailed to the side of a neighbor’s shed and chasing the ball down a hill whenever he missed. He didn’t miss often.

West led his high school team to a state championship and guided West Virginia University to the 1959 NCAA Final Four. He had 28 points and 11 rebounds and was named the tournament’s most outstanding player in a one-point loss to California in the championship game, a precursor to the titlegame disappointments that would follow.

In a statement, his alma mater called

Wednesday “the day everyone in West Virginia had always dreaded.”

“Jerry West was extremely proud of being a West Virginian,” longtime NBA executive and former Nets GM Rod Thorn, also a native of West Virginia and a member of the Hall of Fame, told the Associated Press. “And he never lost that.”

A strong and rugged defender, a part of his game that was often overlooked because of his scoring prowess, West was named one of the NBA’s 50 greatest players in 1997 and one of its 75 greatest players in 2022. He averaged 27 points and 6.7 assists per game for his career.

He remains the NBA Finals’ all-time leader in total points, field goals made and attempted as well as free throws made and attempted.

West was “the personification of basketball excellence and a friend to all who knew him,” the Clippers said in a statement. West’s wife, Karen, was by his side when he died, the team said. West worked for the Clippers as a consultant for the last seven years.

The NBA has never confirmed that West was the inspiration for its iconic logo. However ...

“While it’s never been officially declared that the logo is Jerry West,” Silver said in 2021, “it sure looks a lot like him.”

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A basketball life lived to the fullest

13 Jun 2024 - New York Post

Mike Vaccaro mvaccaro@nypost.com

THE NFL has a shield, which is probably the way it should be, ice-cold and bedecked in red, white and blue, white stars (and white football) set against a blue field at the top. The NFL is, always has been, about the brand. No ambiguity there. The same goes for the NHL. The logo is black and gray, “NHL” and two stripes. No fuss, no muss. Like hockey players.

For the longest time, it was assumed that the logo for Major League Baseball was based on Harmon Killebrew because, well, it sort of looks like Harmon Killebrew, but that was debunked by the very man who created it, Jerry Dior, who repeatedly explained it was designed to be strictly ambiguous; you can’t tell if it’s a righthanded or a left-handed hitter, and there’s no hint of ethnicity. It could be anyone.

There was never any such uncertainty applied to the NBA logo, however.

“There’s no need to make this harder than it is,” Alan Siegel told me in 1998. “It’s Jerry West.”

Siegel had played high school basketball at Long Beach High with Larry Brown and he’d gone to college at Cornell with Dick Schaap. It was during Schaap’s tenure as editor of Sport magazine that Siegel had been approached by NBA commissioner Walter Kennedy and commissioned to update the league’s logo. Siegel sifted through an array of pictures, saw one of West that struck him perfectly.

“We all liked the verticality,” Siegel told NBA.com in 2021. “I didn’t want to do something with people dunking. I always admired the guards and players who were so multitalented and versatile.”

And thus, the logo.

And thus, Jerry West became The Logo. And in so many ways, there couldn’t possibly have been a better choice for that honor than West, who died peacefully Wednesday at 86 after a full basketball life that included a Final Four at West Virginia, a gold medal playing for Team USA, an NBA championship playing with the Lakers, and building the foundation for 10 more Lakers champions as the team’s GM from 1977-2000.

“Jerry West was the perfect basketball player,” Walt Frazier said in May 2020, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the 1970 Knicks/ Lakers NBA Finals. “He had a textbook jump shot. He was fearless. He could play amazing defense, which I’m not sure a lot of people know. And of course he was clutch. We found that out the hard way.”

That was the very end of Game 3 of those Finals, at the Fabulous Forum. Dave DeBusschere made a tough shot to give the Knicks a 102-100 lead with three seconds left. The Lakers were out of timeouts. West took the inbounds pass, dribbled three times, then let fly from a few paces short of the half-court line. “Swish,” Clyde recalled. “It wasn’t even a crazy bounce or a heave off the backboard. It was like he’d just made a free throw. It was incredible.”

It was also something of a Cliffs Notes version of West’s playing career. So often his brilliance wasn’t enough to overcome hard luck and harder fate. The Lakers lost that game in OT, and lost the series in seven. A year earlier he’d been named MVP of the Finals despite the Lakers losing in seven to the Celtics, the only time a losing player has ever received that honor. In six NBA Finals against the Celtics, West’s Lakers went 0-6. In 1959, he’d scored 28 points and added 11 rebounds but his West Virginia Mountaineers lost the NCAA championship game to Cal, 71-70; once again he won Most Outstanding Player despite playing for the runner-up.

West’s two notable exceptions to that hardluck habit were memorable ones, though. In 1960, he played on what is generally considered the greatest-ever amateur basketball team, teaming with Oscar Robertson to steamroll eight opponents by an average of 42 points to win gold in Rome. And in 1971-72, he teamed with Wilt Chamberlain as the Lakers won 33 games in a row (a record that still stands) on the way to 69 wins and a title.

As a GM he was at least partly responsible for putting together all five Showtime Lakers champs in the ’80s, then managed to outbluff the Nets’ John Calipari and wiggle his way into picking Kobe Bryant in the 1996 draft, soon after signing Shaquille O’Neal away from the Magic. That set the stage for five more Lakers titles.

It was a full and quite spectacular basketball life for The Logo, even if the NBA has never officially admitted that’s West, and even though West himself was to the end uncomfortable with the connection.

“It’s flattering,” he said in 2013. “But I think there were so many players who came before me who merited that kind of honor, and many who came after. Basketball is never about one man.”