If JJ Redick had approached the season signalling a measure of outward self-awareness that he, a former player with no head coaching experience and cohost of a podcast with LeBron James, was now head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, things might be different.
If Redick had acknowledged that very obvious, and unique to our contemporary basketball moment of athlete-driven media elephant in the room, things might be different. If Redick had at any point, when asked about his new role in scrums wherein he knows the clips and audio of his answers will be immediately and robustly aggregated, balanced out his self-aggrandizing basketball sicko-hood, or answers where he likened head coaching to nothing short of personal destiny, with something like, It’s a learning curve, really anything a hair more measured, things might be different.
Things would not look different. The Lakers made no real structural changes to their roster in the offseason, so the team playing bad basketball now is the same team that was playing bad basketball last season under Darvin Ham (Redick is one game off the 13-9 pace set by Ham last season), but things might be interpreted, or reasoned with, differently. That kind of grace, for a struggling franchise with major conflicting timelines and high-stakes notions like legacy on the line, goes a long way.
There is such a fine line in coaching between collaborative and domineering, confident and arrogant, and many first-time head NBA coaches have learned the hard way what it is to lose a team, and lose them quickly. Nate Bjorkgren went into the Pacers organization not just hot but by many accounts scorching, and was expeditiously fired at the end of his lone year in Indiana. Jason Kidd may have traded in his string of short-lived head coaching appointments (Nets, Bucks — and surprise! — Lakers) for his current and seemingly steady job with the Mavs, but there is no doubt a type afforded the leniency of multiple failures in the NBA, and it tends to be white, male and abidingly faultless.
To Redick’s credit, he has vocally shouldered the blame of the Lakers recent, bad losses. When the team fell to the Timberwolves 109-80 to start the month, Redick noted their lacklustre effort was “looking more and more like it’s not an aberration”, correcting himself from a late-November blown effort against the Nuggets he said was. This week’s impressive loss to the Heat resulted in a two minute explanation from Redick that skimmed the existential and was anchored in the heavy weight of realization.
What’s difficult from here — beyond how the Lakers improve when their offensive energy is sporadic at best and their approach to defence has been to literally stand back and watch — is how to move forward into the long season still ahead, with the base level of competency and pride necessary for a cohesive team to function. Redick’s reluctance to enter this season going anything other than full throttle on the bravado scale makes back-peddling on expectation not impossible, but significantly harder. His dig at the player class of NBA seasons of yore, calling them “plumbers and firemen”, might have had traction as a pundit but now that he’s tasked with leading a roster of those he deigned the most elite of their athletic lineage and still coming up short, well, it’s not the first legacy full-circle you want.
Legacy is a concept top of mind for the team this season, adding another tricky element for a first time coach to navigate. The first father-son duo, of LeBron and Bronny James, playing together in the history of the league, while the former faces the growing reality that he might finally be slowing down, is a lot. Both in narrative and reality. The senior James’ timelessness has been a feature of the NBA for literal decades and though it’s just unfortunate timing, that permanence running out on Redick’s watch is a possibility.
To get grace one has to give it; and has to be far-sighted enough to set aside the lure of dazzling hubris and its immediate optics for the longevity — and less flashy trappings — of humility. This has never, in franchise history, been the Lakers way.