In brief: Westhead toils in obscurity

Basketball: While Phil Jackson and the Los Angeles Lakers chase another NBA championship, the coach who guided Magic Johnson’s memorable rookie playoff run toils in near anonymity.

Paul Westhead’s circuitous coaching journey has taken him to the University of Oregon, where in March the former Lakers and Loyola Marymount coach was hired to lead the struggling women’s basketball program.

If this seems a curious choice for a veteran NBA coach who also once commanded the Chicago Bulls and Denver Nuggets, Westhead doesn’t agree.

Given a five-year contract that reportedly will pay him about $3 million, he said he looks forward to the task of turning around a team that lost a school-record 21 games last season.

“This is what I do,” he said.

Westhead recently turned 70 and is a grandfather 10 times over.

Los Angeles Times

Bullet strikes Little Leaguer

Baseball: When an 11-year-old sitting on bleachers with his Little League team grabbed his head and started crying, his family thought he had been whacked by a ball. Hours later they learned he had been struck by a stray bullet.

The boy, Devante Kelly, was in stable condition Monday at Brookdale University Hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y. Doctors removed the bullet, which lodged between the boy’s skin and skull, and he was expected to recover, his family said.

Kelly was on bleachers crowded with players in a field on Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn. Kelly and other members of his Spring Creek Little League team, the Mets, were waiting for their team photo when he cried out in pain.

“All the while he’s in the emergency room for two, three hours and we’re thinking it’s just a baseball that hit him,” Walters said. “When the doctor went to put (in) staples, she saw something. … And we took a CAT scan, and there was a bullet in his head.”

Associated Press

Finals ratings have mixed bag

TV: Television ratings for Game 2 of the NBA Finals are down slightly from last year.

ABC said Monday that the Los Angeles Lakers’ 101-96 overtime win over the Orlando Magic on Sunday night earned an 8.2 fast national rating. That’s down less than 4 percent from the 8.5 for last season’s Game 2.

Meanwhile, Game 4 of the Stanley Cup final earned the series’ highest cable television rating since 2002.

The Pittsburgh Penguins’ 4-2 win over the Detroit Red Wings on Versus on Thursday night drew a 2.8 rating and averaged 3.45 million viewers.

Associated Press