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Thirteen games into the Los Angeles Lakers’ season, freshman head coach JJ Redick is not the headline story – and that’s a story in and of itself. There are, of course, plenty of other storylines for the Lakers already this year: for starters, the rumblings that they haven’t done enough to provide a competent supporting cast around superstars Anthony Davis and LeBron James, the former of whom is having an MVP-caliber start to the season. Then there are the cries of nepotism at the signing of James’ son, Bronny. They may not be true championship contenders, but at 9-4 the Lakers look, at least, like a solidly good NBA team. One might never guess that their coach has only a few weeks of experience.
Redick, the sharpshooting NBA veteran turned podcaster turned broadcaster turned head coach, faced plenty of scrutiny when he was appointed this summer, dealing with accusations that he’d “skipped the line” or that he’d only been granted the job opportunity in order to appease LeBron, Redick’s podcast co-host as recently as this year. It’s been widely reported, after all, that the only head coaching experience Redick possessed before he got the Lakers gig was with his son’s youth team. When I asked him, a few months ago at his introductory press conference, what he was most looking forward to disproving from the chorus of naysayers, he (now infamously) said he didn’t “give a fuck”. It’s possible, of course, that the once chronically online Redick may have been trying to convince himself of this sentiment as much as he was trying to persuade the rest of the world. But it’s clear that the one-time Duke legend has tuned out the noise enough to stay focused on the task at hand.
Heading into the season, there were murmurs that the Lakers felt they had found their “next Pat Riley”, and while that set a preposterously high bar for a first-year head coach, there are several similarities. Redick and Riley are both former players, briefly broadcasters, who are slickly dressed, smooth talking and intelligent. But their most important shared trait is an obsession with the sport. Redick lives and breathes basketball. NBA alum Baron Davis recently said he spotted him going over game tape in a car wash, which Redick himself sheepishly confirmed.
Redick has described his own constitution as that of a “basketball sicko” (even going so far as to proclaim that hiring fellow “sickos” for his coaching staff was “non-negotiable”), so in advance of a recent game at Crypto.com arena I ask him to define his would-be catchphrase. “Somebody who’s obsessed with basketball, someone who’s willing to get into the weeds all the time,” he says. “Somehow I relate everything back to the game of basketball, somehow every connection in my life has been formed or reinforced through the game of basketball.”
His players characterize him similarly, describing him as passionate and dedicated, and highly, highly competitive. “He’s very enthusiastic,” says guard Max Christie. “Enthusiastic about the game, about winning, about us. About everything he does.” Small forward Cam Reddish tells me of Redick, “He’s not a yeller, but he’s gonna hold everyone accountable, you know what I’m saying? Like he’ll yell, but [he’s] not just yelling for no reason.” I ask Reddish what he feels Redick’s identity is, so far, as a coach. “He’s a winner,” he says. “He wants to win. He wants to win everything.”
As early as media day, Lakers players were praising Redick’s preparedness and playbook (and firing off some not-so-subtle digs at former head coach Darvin Ham, fired this spring and now back in Milwaukee on Doc Rivers’ staff, in the process). Davis talked about that same preparedness after the Lakers’ victory on opening night, kicking off a three-game win streak to open the season. “The gameplan, the schemes that he had on both ends of the floor, he trusts us,” Davis said. “We trust him, as far as what he teaches us, what he wants us to do on the floor on both ends.”
It’s interesting to contrast the veteran Rivers’ Milwaukee Bucks, who are, to put it mildly, struggling to start the season, with Redick’s Lakers. Both teams are built around a formidable but aging superstar tandem (Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard, and Anthony Davis and LeBron James, respectively). Both teams have some interesting supporting cast members, but could definitely stand to see improvements in that arena. The Bucks, however, won just four of their first 13 games. It would be foolhardy to blame Rivers entirely, but he shoulders part of the blame, and his vast coaching resume and pedigree played a large part, no doubt, in his hiring. Contrasting the two teams’ successes (or lack thereof) thus far does raise the question whether the prerequisite of experience in coaching, is, perhaps, overblown.
Indeed, despite the historical reluctance to hand the keys over to an unknown quantity, some of the qualities exclusive to a fresh-off-the-rack head coach may prove advantageous. Without the inevitable baggage that comes with a years-long coaching tenure, freshmen head coaches may be both more amenable to taking chances, and less likely to elicit eye-rolls from their players in the process. And with former players, as is the case with Redick, having played recently enough that many, or even most, of your roster remembers watching you can prove helpful for earning players’ respect as well. Rookie Dalton Knecht, a shooting sniper in Redick’s own image, has long derived inspiration from Redick’s game. “I watched him in college, learning how he set his man up, and how he came off screens, to get the ball and get wide open looks, and I did that a lot in Tennessee,” Knecht tells me after a win at home against the Grizzlies. “And now I can just ask him in person, like, ‘Hey, how do you do this?’ and he’s been helpful every single step of the way.”
There are, of course, downsides to a maniacal dedication to the craft. When I ask Redick how he feels being a self-proclaimed “sicko” has impacted his coaching approach, he quickly quips back, “I can tell you how it’s impacted my personal life…” When asked to expound, he adds: “I was obviously part of basketball [during his stint in broadcasting], but you take a break for three years, and then you get back into it, and you’re just easily reminded of how much of your bandwidth and brain just gravitates towards basketball,” he pauses and breathes deeply, “and that can have an impact on your personal life.” It certainly couldn’t have been an easy sell for Redick to ask his wife to uproot their young family from their longtime home in Brooklyn all the way across the country to Los Angeles for the gig, but the basketball-obsessed heart wants what it wants. “I just felt like this is what I was supposed to be doing,” Redick said at his introductory press conference, of following the potentially precarious path to coaching.
Picking a first-time head coach with an illustrious NBA career doesn’t always go off without a hitch, as evidenced by the short and less-than-sweet stint Steve Nash had in Brooklyn. But if Redick can keep up the 57-win pace he’s set so far, other teams might think twice before selecting a tried-and-true pick from the fired-head-coach carousel they have tended to choose from in their candidate pools. As Redick has shown, in the tradition of Riley before him, if a guy is smart enough, savvy enough, and “sicko” enough, that may just be enough. And “no experience necessary” listings on NBA head coaching job boards may very well be the way of the future.
