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Dave McMenamin, ESPN Staff WriterSep 30, 2024, 08:00 AM ET
- Lakers and NBA reporter for ESPN.
- Covered the Lakers and NBA for ESPNLosAngeles.com from 2009-14, the Cavaliers from 2014-18 for ESPN.com and the NBA for NBA.com from 2005-09.
TWO WEEKS BEFORE the start of training camp, JJ Redick sat in a workroom at the Los Angeles Lakers practice facility with his legs crossed, a team-issued quarter-zip up top and Nike Kobe sneakers down below. (“I never wore them when I played,” Redick told ESPN, “but now that I’m here, [Lakers GM] Rob [Pelinka] has the hookup.”) Redick had just finished running a sizable portion of the Lakers roster through a voluntary offseason practice, cognizant of what little time remained before the curtain opens on his first season as an NBA coach.
“Put 45 [minutes] on the clock, got right through it,” Redick said of his approach to practice that day. “Everything you do is, like, very thoughtful.”
Redick, 40, already looks the part, with his black, coiffed hair and put-together appearance drawing comparisons within the organization to former “Showtime” coach Pat Riley. And he sounds the part, too. As a clear and confident communicator, Redick navigates the interview with ease until the newly minted coach is asked a simple yet essential question:
Why did you take this job?
“Um,” Redick, after pausing a beat, responds. “That’s probably the best question.”
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Three years into retiring from a 15-season playing career, Redick detoured from burgeoning media stardom to shoot his shot with the Lakers. He has yet to coach a professional basketball game in any capacity. Not as a head coach. Not as an assistant. Not even roaming the sidelines for a summer league game.
But the self-described “basketball sicko,” despite the challenges ahead for a franchise seemingly in flux as it attempts to navigate the end of LeBron James‘ career, the beginning of Bronny’s and keeping Laker Nation satisfied by competing in the present without forsaking the future, feels as if he is built for this.
“[With] my understanding of the modern game, my relationships with players, it felt like the right time for me personally to go into coaching,” Redick said.
“And then obviously I wanted to coach the Lakers.”
AFTER JAMES DOMINATED the New Orleans Pelicans on Dec. 7, with 30 points and eight assists in 22 minutes to earn a berth in the inaugural in-season tournament championship game in Las Vegas, the star turned a postgame dinner into a business meeting.
Maverick Carter, James’ longtime confidant and co-founder of his “Uninterrupted” production company, invited Redick to join them at the Michelin-starred Wing Lei, located off the gaming floor by the entrance to the tower suites in the Wynn Casino. Inside the bright dining room adorned with flowers and gold-leaf dragons, the 3-point specialist and the all-time great realized how much they have in common when it comes to how they see the game.
“We discussed sort of the initial thoughts around some place for him to talk about basketball,” Redick said.
The playing careers of the two basketball lifers overlapped but never quite intersected. Redick was a DNP in five of the six games they shared when the Orlando Magic upset the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2009 Eastern Conference finals. He played just 17 minutes per game when the Milwaukee Bucks were swept by James’ Miami Heat in the 2013 first round. Early in James’ L.A. tenure, the Lakers inquired about trading with New Orleans for Redick but nothing developed, sources told ESPN.
That dinner conversation could have very well stayed in Vegas.
“I heard [of the dinner] and was like, ‘Sure, yeah, whatever,” Jason Gallagher, who produced Redick’s other podcast, “The Old Man and The Three,” told ESPN. “In this industry, you hear stuff all the time. You’re like, ‘Yeah, definitely.’ Like, that would be sick, but probably not. … And then it quickly became very real.”
LeBron James went 24-11 against JJ Redick during his NBA career, including a 5-0 playoff record. Chris Graythen/Getty Images
Redick, who became the first active player with a weekly podcast in 2016 while playing for the LA Clippers, got James on board. They filmed their first two episodes this past March and launched a couple of weeks later.
“It was really just like, ‘Hey, this guy wants to do it. I want to do it. It’s about basketball. It’s the thing we love the most, so like, let’s just put it out there,'” Redick said.
The leap of faith paid off. “Mind the Game” averaged 1.5 million views per episode and quickly amassed more than 500,000 subscribers on YouTube.
“After the initial sit down, I sort of pushed,” Redick said. “I said, ‘We can’t have this be anything else than what it is. This is as pure as it gets for this space. I don’t want to water it down with anything else. This is really good.'”
“We had fun during our podcast,” James told ESPN. “It’s very easy to talk to JJ. … He’s smart as hell, if anybody watched the podcast.”
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But while their product was aimed at celebrating the purity of the sport — the journeyman role player and the all-time great filming segments in which X’s and O’s were often drawn with a Sharpie on a pile of paper in episodes for viewers accustomed to basketball content predicated on opinion — the launch came with a stark reminder of the politics involved in the pro game.
When the first episode released March 19, James’ Lakers were coming off a stretch in when they’d gone 6-7 after the All-Star break and coach Darvin Ham’s job was being called into question. Some viewed the podcast as unfair to Ham — even though Redick and James touched on Lakers topics only lightly.
The heightened attention James and the Lakers’ brand brings is extremely beneficial for getting a new podcast off the ground. But is it an enviable environment for a coach? After all, even Redick’s college coach and mentor, Mike Krzyzewski, said no to the Lakers when they came calling.
TWENTY YEARS BEFORE Redick became the 29th coach in Lakers history, Krzyzewski turned down the chance to be the 20th — and to replace Phil Jackson — in the summer of 2004.
Pelinka, working as Kobe Bryant’s agent at the time, remembers the conversation at late owner Dr. Jerry Buss’ house. Weeks before Shaquille O’Neal was traded to the Miami Heat, the group gorged on slices from California Pizza Kitchen and pondered the team’s future when Coach K’s name was cooked up.
“It was like, ‘Hey, what are you looking for Kobe? And he just started talking about discipline and militaristic and inspirational and hard-nosed and Coach’s name just came to light,” Pelinka told ESPN. “And then before, you know it, the Lakers made an attempt to hire him.”
Krzyzewski, 57 at the time, heard L.A.’s pitch and took the Fourth of July weekend to mull it over, calling Redick, who had just finished his sophomore season with the Blue Devils, to tell him he would be radio silent for a couple of days.
“Coach was the primary reason that I went to Duke — to play for him,” Redick said. “So I definitely called some friends at different schools. I was like, ‘Hey, uh, do you guys have a spot? I might be transferring.'”
Mike Krzyzewski, now the all-time winningest coach in men’s college basketball history, turned down an opportunity to coach Kobe Bryant and the Lakers in 2004. AP Photo/Alex Brandon
Krzyzewski — who to this day says “the idea of coaching Kobe was huge” and also was tempted by the “generational wealth” included in the reported five-year, $40 million deal — turned down the offer. He coached at Duke for 18 more seasons, winning two more NCAA national titles — and ended up coaching Bryant to two Olympic gold medals.
“I think if I was 57 now and it was offered, I would go,” Krzyzewski, 77, told ESPN. “I still love Duke. College basketball is terrific — the product. All the stuff you have to do for it, it’s not as gratifying as it was 20 years ago. At least for me.”
When he saw a report this spring that Redick was interested in leaving his podcast, broadcast and analyst work behind to coach in the NBA, he called to test his mentee.
“Just to find out, is this a lark or is it, you know, an ego trip?” Krzyzewski said of his talk with Redick. “Because, not that I’m saying he’s looking for that, but it can be intoxicating to get attention and in a different way. Like, he already proved himself in the media world, got to the highest rung right away on TV.
“It was basically to find out, are you serious? … And he said, ‘I am serious.’ He said, ‘I want to be an NBA coach. I think I can be a really good NBA coach.'”
Said Redick: “A lot of that initial phone call was just explaining to him what was on my heart and my mind and sort of what I wanted to do, which was coach. And I think that that got him more excited, to be honest with you. …That was not a ploy for media attention, believe me.”
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Redick first caught the coaching bug in the spring of 2023 when he interviewed with the Toronto Raptors, he said. It got stronger when, that summer, he worked with former New York Knicks guard Quentin Grimes and other young NBA prospects in the Hamptons, putting them through individual workouts the way Hakeem Olajuwon was famous for well into retirement — with one distinction between him and The Dream. “That was a volunteer situation. I’m not charging people $50,000,” Redick said with a smirk.
By the time the Charlotte Hornets and Lakers expressed interest in their coaching vacancies, he was convinced it was his calling. He just needed some convincing that the Lakers were the right fit for him.
From when Redick first talked about the position with Pelinka during the NBA draft combine in May, to officially becoming a Lakers candidate along with New Orleans assistant James Borrego and UConn coach Dan Hurley, several people close to Redick told him it would be a bad idea to take it, sources told ESPN.
You’re already doing so well in media, they said. Just wait and other opportunities will arise, he heard. Hey, someone is going to have to replace Gregg Popovich in San Antonio at some point, you could be the guy to coach Victor Wembanyama, they reasoned. Have you paid attention to the Lakers lately? They’re a circus, was the refrain.
“I think in response to the people who say, ‘You had such a good thing going on,’ they were correct. I enjoyed three years of retirement. I really did. The things that I was able to do in media have not been lost on me … and all the stuff that we did in the podcast space. I’m very proud of it.
“There’s a competitive itch that I have every single day of my life. And no matter how many swings I took, that was not getting satisfied. And so, I felt a real calling in terms of the competitive side.”
Redick did have one major concern he needed answered: Did L.A. just want him because of his relationship with LeBron?
JJ Redick is the 29th head coach in Lakers history. None of the past six have lasted more than three seasons. Ronald Martinez/Getty Images
Pelinka was cognizant of the inflection point in which his team found itself. James’ career was nearing the end. L.A. had plans to draft James’ son, Bronny, creating a roster dynamic unprecedented in league history. Anthony Davis was still in his prime, but the Lakers failed to capitalize last season when Davis was healthy enough to play 76 games. The rest of the roster was largely unproven and the league’s new salary cap system makes completing trades as tricky as it has ever been. Not to mention that Hurley, just like Krzyzewski from the college ranks before him, said thanks but no thanks.
So Pelinka made an appeal to Redick.
“It was very clear to us,” Pelinka said. “We were not trying to go out and hire a coach to coach LeBron’s final chapter. We weren’t. This was, could we find someone that would be really good at that? And I would assume LeBron would be very proud that someone like that is also helping his son learn the game. Someone that cerebral and that competitive and that motivated.
“But it’s setting up for the other side of that. And that kind of goes back into how are we going to prepare … so that when LeBron does step away, there’s not the cliff that maybe some other franchises have experienced.”
REDICK WAS EATING lunch with his dad when he fielded perhaps the most important phone call of his life. Plucked from the television and podcast studios with no previous coaching experience, he was offered a chance to call the shots for one of the most glamourous franchises in the world — and had someone he needed to talk to before he could accept.
“‘Dad, I got to go make one call,'” Redick said, recalling how he pushed his chair back from his table at the stately Washington Duke Inn on Duke’s golf course on June 20.
“So, that’s when I first called LeBron. First time we had talked about me coaching. And I came back. I sat back down. I said, ‘All right, I’m in.'”
Redick’s prioritization was telling. Pelinka and team governor Jeanie Buss offered him the gig and will ostensibly be his bosses. But Redick’s success, or lack thereof, will largely depend on getting the most out of a guy who is just six months his junior suiting up for his 22nd season.
After forging a connection with James over their shared love of the sport, Redick being “in” as the next coach of the Lakers will test if that sense of purity can remain.
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And if it wasn’t challenging enough already to be the coach responsible for managing James at this stage of his career, he has to do it while also combating a perception he was hand-picked by James for the part. “It’s a juicy-ass story, but it’s not true,” Gallagher said.
What is true is there will be far more scrutiny on Redick for how he handles coaching LeBron’s 19-year-old son Bronny than there was coaching his sons, 10-year-old Knox and 8-year-old Kai.
Rather than perceive coaching LeBron and Bronny as a no-win situation, Redick has compartmentalized. Coaching LeBron, he says, is a chance to strategize with another savant of the sport. Coaching Bronny is a chance to pour into a young player determined to make it, something he can relate to as the guy collecting DNPs in his early days in Orlando. And Redick simultaneously possesses the audacity to think he can build a career with the purple and gold while knowing that none of the past six coaches since Jackson have lasted more than three seasons.
“There’s no assurances in this industry,” Redick said. “I recognize that at any point in time, I could be let go. That’s a reality.”
And James, whose final seasons will coincide with Redick’s first as a coach and Bronny’s first as a player, wants to make it work to set up his son, his co-host turned coach and the Lakers franchise beyond his playing days.
“I wanted the Lakers, as a player and as a fan of the franchise, to be able to hire the coach that should be there,” James said. “Not only as I’m finishing my career, but long after I’m gone because there’s been so many guys in that seat over the last few years. And to be able to find someone that could be stable in that position is very key for any franchise.
“And for me to be a part of a legacy franchise, I feel like that was important.”
And Redick is just enough of a basketball sicko to think he is the guy meant to pull it off.
“It’s kind of nuts,” Krzyzewski said. “But good nuts.”
