June 24, 2024, 07:11 pm ET
EL SEGUNDO, California — JJ Redick says his extraordinary hire as head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers means the end of his podcast with LeBron James.
Redick hopes to produce much more engaging content next season in a new incarnation of their partnership: chasing a championship alongside the Lakers.
The Lakers formally introduced Redick as their coach on Monday, which also happened to be the 15-year NBA veteran’s 40th birthday.
At a news conference with general manager Rob Pelinka at the Lakers’ training complex, Redick humorously accepted the unlikelihood of his extraordinary hire as he looked out over a gym filled with team employees, members of the media and some of his new players. .
“I’ve never coached in the NBA before,” Redick said with a straight face. “I don’t know if you guys have heard that.”
Redick’s coaching experience is limited to volunteering on his children’s youth teams, but he plans to bridge that enormous gap with encyclopedic basketball knowledge, personal charisma, a coaching staff full of experience and enthusiasm for innovation.
“This process has been surreal, to say the least,” Redick said. “I take this responsibility very seriously…The Lakers have some of the most passionate fans in the world, and the expectation is a championship, so my job is to create a championship-caliber team. That’s what I signed up for.” “.
Redick also said he got this opportunity without help or advice from James, who must decide this week whether to exercise his player option to return to the Lakers next season or become a free agent.
Although Redick didn’t break any news, he spoke at length about how he hopes to deploy James next season with the Lakers, including shooting more 3-pointers to capitalize on his high percentage.
Redick said he didn’t speak to James at all about the lengthy coaching search in Los Angeles until a 15-minute conversation after the Lakers offered him the job on Thursday. But Redick has spoken at length with fellow Lakers star Anthony Davis, who was more involved than James in the team’s recruiting process.
However, Redick and James won’t be speaking on the microphone together anytime soon: Redick acknowledges he’ll have to stop recording his podcast.
“For the moment – and I hope it will be for a long, long time – I am excommunicated from the content space,” Redick said. “There will be no podcasts. We’ll do something when I get a break from what’s ahead. I’ll be drinking out of a fire hose for the next month.”
The Lakers reached an agreement with Redick last week, about two weeks after UConn coach Dan Hurley turned down a lucrative offer to jump to the NBA from the back-to-back defending national champion Huskies. Neither Redick nor Hurley have ever coached in the NBA.
Redick said he met with Pelinka before the Lakers pursued Hurley, and that he was on the KeynoteUSA broadcast as the saga unfolded.
“At no time were my ego or feelings hurt or bruised in any way,” Redick said. “Dan Hurley is a two-time national champion at UConn. I’m a two-time 55 Swish League champion in the third and fourth grade division. I got it, you know?”
Redick played 15 seasons in the NBA for six teams as a productive shooting guard after a four-year career at Duke. He became the Blue Devils’ career scoring leader under coach Mike Krzyzewski.
After retiring in 2021, Redick embarked on a career in media. In recent months, he started the “Mind the Game” podcast with James while also moving up to KeynoteUSA’s lead commentary team, working the NBA Finals this month. However, Redick realized last year that he wanted to be an NBA head coach after interviewing for the job in Toronto, and since then he has spoken extensively with top coaches about all aspects of his job.
Redick’s eye-opening podcast with James opened many eyes to Redick’s understanding of the game, and his name emerged as a viable, if unorthodox, candidate to replace Darvin Ham, who had been fired on May 3.
Ham was fired by Pelinka and owner Jeanie Buss despite leading the Lakers to two winning seasons, the 2023 Western Conference finals and a victory in the season-opening tournament. The Lakers lost to defending champion Denver in the first round of the postseason and have won just one game in two playoff series against the Nuggets in the past two years.
“I think in the industry in general and in sports in particular, sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in patterns of being in a sea of similarities and doing the same things that everyone else is doing,” Pelinka said. “When we embarked on this search, it was very important to us to see if we could do something a little different.”
Lakers players, including Spencer Dinwiddie, Christian Wood and Gabe Vincent, attended the press conference.
Redick spoke optimistically about the Lakers’ roster, saying championship expectations are “reasonable. I don’t consider the current roster to be that far away from being a championship-caliber team.”
Keynote USA
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