West played on West Virginia University basketball teams in the late 1950s that won 87 percent of their games and years later in the pros, he was a key member of the 1972 Los Angeles Lakers team that won 69 of 82 games and is considered among the greatest in NBA history.
As general manager of the Lakers, West was responsible for assembling LA’s great “Showtime” teams of the mid-1980s with center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and 6-foot-9-inch point guard Ervin “Magic” Johnson, and he built another Lakers dynasty in the late 1990s when he was able to pair center Shaquille O’Neal with guard Kobe Bryant.