JJ Redick acknowledged something he hadn’t planned to divulge.
When asked how different it feels being in his third year as an NBA coach than his first, he opened up.
“I probably shouldn’t admit this,” Redick said at Lakers practice Wednesday, “but early in my coaching career I felt like I was cosplaying a little bit, you know? It’s like I was pretending to be a coach.”
Redick was stunningly hired to take over the Lakers’ helm in June 2024 after Darvin Ham was fired.
Why was it so eyebrow-raising?
He had no coaching experience. He was taking over a 17-time championship franchise. There was no margin for error.
Talk about pressure.
Redick has always come across as ultra-confident. He had to be. But on Wednesday, he let us peek behind his tough veneer.
Even the coach of the Lakers can have imposter syndrome.
Good thing for the Lakers, their gamble has panned out.
Last season, Redick became the first coach since Phil Jackson to have back-to-back 50-win seasons.
Redick has drawn comparisons to Pat Riley, who had very little coaching experience (two years as a Laker assistant from 1979-81) before taking over the helm in 1981. Riley went on to win four championships in LA. Last season, he was honored with a statue outside of Crypto.com Arena.
As for Redick, he still has a long way to go. The Lakers haven’t gotten past the second round of the playoffs since he took over, though Luka Dončić, Austin Reaves and Walker Kessler desperately want to help him change that.
“I think he’s got a little more gray hair. but he’s been great,” Reaves said when asked about Redick’s growth over the last three seasons. “Care factor’s high, intelligence is high. He cares more than anybody else and wants to win just like we do. So, you know, having that as a coach, you respect that.”
This much is for sure: Redick has gained the respect of everyone in the locker room over the last two seasons. No one is second-guessing the Lakers’ decision to hire him anymore.
And Redick no longer feels as though he’s faking it.
“I just think you get more reps, you get more comfortable,” Redick said.
That said, Redick is very much still learning.
He’s the first to admit when he thinks he could’ve handled situations better. There was the time he snapped at a reporter who asked if he was going to lean on his assistants for substitution patterns ahead of Game 5 of the first round of the 2025 playoffs. Or when he and Doncic shared a tense moment on the bench last season. After both of those moments, he vowed to do better.
Redick is willing to do the hard work. He’s introspective. He obsessively rewatches games in a dark basement.
He’s his harshest critic.
That led to a major change last season.
“I had a great revelation towards the second half of last year that I talked about with my performance coach this summer,” Redick said. “…Some of the things that helped me as a player are deterrents for me as a coach. I think particularly with last year’s team — and I don’t know how this year’s team is going to be — but I felt like calm is better.
“When I played — I talked with Coach K [Mike Krzyzewski] about it this summer — when I played, I played with an anger. There was an inner-anger that drove my competitiveness. That’s not always a good thing as a coach, particularly now.”
Redick, who was known as a dagger 3-point shooter during his 15 seasons in the NBA, realized he needed to adjust his style.
He set the tone. If he was too intense, it resonated differently as a coach than as a player. Instead of being inspiring, it was detrimental.
So, Redick adjusted.
After laying into the Lakers following an embarrassing 119-96 loss to the Rockets on Christmas, Redick was noticeably calmer when they dropped the rope in subsequent games. And as the season progressed that started happening less and less.
Then in the spring, the Lakers showed what they were made of by going on a 16-2 run. Everyone around the league began to wonder if they were championship contenders before Doncic and Reaves suffered injuries on April 2.
Redick then inspired the Lakers to believe they could win without their two-highest scorers in the playoffs. They went on to beat the Rockets in the first round before being swept by the Thunder in the Western Conference semifinals.
This season will be yet another learning curve for Redick.
But he’s ready for whatever comes.
He knows he belongs.
And that’s very obvious to the rest of the league, too.
