Who’s Taking the Bigger Risk: JJ Redick or the Lakers?

Los Angeles just hired a head coach with no experience, but the player turned podcaster might be the one putting more on the line by accepting the job

• By
  
  Danny Chau
  
• on June 20, 2024 3:58 pm

The biggest breakout star from the 2023-24 NBA season? The red chisel-tipped dry erase markers JJ Redick has been using for the Mind the Game podcast, his ode to NBA tacticalia with co-host LeBron James. The first four to nine minutes of every episode serve as a condensed lecture of sorts, wherein Redick explains basketball terminology and diagrams on a whiteboard, breaking down concepts and actions that will be referenced in his conversation with arguably the greatest to ever play the game.

The podcast’s opening prologue is a meditation—at least, that’s what it looks like for Redick, who breaks things down as succinctly as he can. No music, no special effects, just his voice and a fixed camera shot capturing the marker in Redick’s hand as it scrawls along. The chisel tip is a versatile tool. Unlike a fine tip marker that has a fixed point of contact, the chisel design allows for varying line thicknesses depending on which part of the tip graces the surface. Redick defaults to the sharp edge of the chisel, trained on precision, when diagramming. But if he’s trying to express a lot of action in a small amount of real estate, he’ll occasionally Varejão the marker’s tip, flipping to the broader side that allows for a thicker line. Though from his hand language, it’s usually not intentional. He’s just excited. (For those curious about the X’s and O’s of Redick’s X’s and O’s, he draws an X with an initial downward stroke from northwest to southeast, then crosses it with an upward stroke from southwest to northeast, which ironically demonstrates unorthodox mechanics for a right-handed writer with one of the best shooting forms in NBA history. He draws an O counterclockwise—very conventional.)

It’s clear that this has become Redick’s happy place, away from berating the lowness of hot-take culture on water-cooler debate shows, in a space that affords him more than the few seconds he has to offer a fragment of insight before clearing out for Mike Breen on a live-game broadcast. Think of Mind the Game’s interludes as a sort of left-brain analog to The Joy of Painting introductions that list all the different colors of paint necessary to follow along, right on the screen. Mike Fratello may forever be the Czar of the Telestrator, but Redick has become the Bob Ross for the terminally basketball-pilled. But Redick’s days as Podcaster General may be coming to an end—at least I’d hope so, for the sake of his sleep schedule.

Just three days after Redick called the Boston Celtics’ championship-clinching Game 5 victory over the Dallas Mavericks, the news we were all expecting has been made official: Redick will be the new head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers after signing a four-year contract with the team on Thursday morning, according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski. Mind the Game might as well have been a fever dream. This is a pivot away from video and toward one of the sloppiest, most spectacular NBA coaching regimes in recent history—one that has already managed to serve as the backdrop to a petty proxy war among the league’s two foremost rumormongers and cast a light on just how much the shadow dealings of newsbreakers and unnamed agents can shape both public opinion and leverage in negotiations.

As is par for the course in the Buss-Pelinka era, it was a long and winding road to get here. It started with a report from Lakers insider Anthony Irwin on May 18, with sources claiming the Lakers had “zeroed in” on Redick as their new head coach. Then came a report in early June from The Athletic’s Shams Charania that Redick was the overwhelming front-runner for the job in the lead-up to the NBA Finals. Then we all went on a detour engaging in an entire Dan Hurley news cycle, before landing right where it all began. Irwin called it a done deal less than 24 hours after Game 5. Two days of silence, only to bring us back to what we already accepted in our hearts. Nothing easy, a prophet once said.

Redick—a 15-year NBA veteran, ESPN pundit-analyst, and groundbreaking sports podcaster—will become a rookie head coach with no prior coaching experience, save for his role as the volunteer head coach of the fourth-grade boys team at Brooklyn Basketball Academy, where his 9-year-old son, Knox, plays. He had previously been interviewed for head coaching positions with the Charlotte Hornets and the Toronto Raptors, as well as for an assistant coach position on Joe Mazzulla’s Boston Celtics—and those are only the franchises that have made their interest public. “Six to eight” teams have contacted Redick with interest in him joining their coaching staff, Redick noted in an appearance on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast back in January.

There is a sense that Redick is chasing a familiar level of immersion that now eludes him. He has become a legitimate media sensation off the sheer breadth and relentlessness of his presence, talking about the NBA from every possible angle across multiple platforms, speaking a language of basketball that much of his audience is nowhere near as fluent in. Where Redick shows the most potential as a future coach is in his rare talent as a communicator: He can talk in the hoop idiom of players, coaches, the media, and analytics. And he’s spent the past eight years developing the muscles required to bridge those divides with his ESPN presence and podcasts over the years with Yahoo!, Uninterrupted, The Ringer, Wondery, and his own production company, ThreeFourTwo. Educating the public is a noble crusade, but it’s taxing—especially when he knows there’s an arena in which he can be understood completely. “When you are in a locker room, a coaches meeting, when you’re talking to front office people, the basketball intellect is different. The people that have lived it. A part of me, for sure, is like, I got to live that for 15 years, and I miss it,” Redick told Torre. “I really like all my jobs. There are parts of all my jobs that I love. The thing that I’ve found that I maybe love the most is the 15 minutes before a game that I call when we get to meet with each coach.”

Many have joked about Mind the Game being one long-ass job interview with LeBron, and there are probably a few grains of truth to that, even if James was indeed taking a hands-off approach to the Lakers’ coaching search. From the front office perspective, the podcast offers visual assurances that have been rare over LeBron’s six seasons with the team. We can’t know how Redick would handle the pressure of an elimination game in a playoff series, but for the Lakers brass, it must be revelatory to see LeBron affirm someone’s ability to break down the game to an atomic level, to see him consistently nod his head in agreement, and play a supporting role in backing the insight of another authority figure. Perhaps that changes in a relationship dynamic that is less peer-to-peer—when LeBron actually has to live in a reality where he’s taking orders from someone only six months older than him—but there is a level of respect there that feels like a crucial first step. The Lakers, in ways subtle and not, bemoaned a lack of preparation and accountability from Darvin Ham this past season; given Redick’s approach at every stage of his basketball career, it’d be more likely that overpreparation, inflexibility in play design, and inexperience in feeling out the flow of play would be reasons for doubt and worry.

Still, my first reaction to the news was: Why? Not for the Lakers, but for the burgeoning media king. Redick has done incredibly well for himself in just about every respect in his post-playing career. In being precise, prepared, and focused in every endeavor he’s taken on, he’s changed his public perception completely. People kind of like JJ Redick now. That, in itself, is a miracle. He could spend the next two decades becoming a beloved media figure, emboldening the next generation of basketball media to further his vision of a greater literacy of the game. Instead, he’s potentially opting for a new venture that will almost surely invite the kind of scrutiny and vitriol that plagued his college years at Duke. Why? Well, because Redick is a psycho. (His words, not mine, I swear.) It informs the longevity of his career and his occasionally condescending presence on TV and podcasts. The sheer amount of work he puts in affords him the right. “I think a little crazy is fine,” Redick told Torre in January. “What has served me well in life is this balance of being even-keeled but also being a psycho. Sometimes that balance gets out of whack and I’ve dealt with some consequences because of that.”

The very same magnetic pull that made Redick one of the most hated college basketball players of all time is what makes him an archetypal Lakers head coach to project onto—both glory and downfall. That charisma is what fuels the hilariously premature comparisons to Pat Riley, who led the Lakers to a title as a 36-year-old rookie head coach and made four Finals appearances by the time he was 40. (Riley also had the luxury of fine-tuning his process over the course of three years as an NBA assistant, which Redick notably wouldn’t have.)

The Lakers have had seven different head coaches since Phil Jackson’s final departure in 2011; the average stint is 147 games, less than two seasons. No coach in that time has lasted longer than three seasons. It’s a job that subsumes the nondescript and humbles the overconfident. You’d have to be a little psycho to take it. Ready or not, Redick was made for this, and all expectations and hyperbole that comes with it. The Lakers are gambling on an unproven talent—with both sharp edges and broad upside—in hopes of finding a leader for the long haul. The Celtics had Red Auerbach. The Lakers are staking their future on the Red Expo.