The Christmas Day slate is always one of the best ones of the NBA calendar and the Los Angeles Lakers are a staple on the holiday given their popularity globally.
However, the Lakers entered their Christmas matchup against the Houston Rockets playing some of their worst basketball of the 2025-26 season. Los Angeles had lost two games in a row in embarrassing fashion, so the fear was that they would struggle against a physical and athletic Houston squad.
Those concerns proved to be valid as the Lakers were blown out by the Rockets in a listless effort almost from the jump. Los Angeles was unable to keep up with Houston, who continually outworked them on the boards and on the defensive end.
Following the dispiriting loss, head coach JJ Redick didn’t mince words about his team’s performance.
“The two words of the day were effort and execution. I feel like when we’ve done both of those things at a high level, we’ve been a good basketball team. When we haven’t, we’re a terrible basketball team. And tonight, we were a terrible basketball team,” Redick admitted.
“And that started legitimately right away. When you point to that, I would assume that Austin’s rebounds in that first two misses, I think that would have been talked about a lot.”
Redick continued to call out the players’ efforts, saying that the group isn’t showing enough care on the floor.
“Because we don’t care enough right now,” Redick said when asked why the team wasn’t able to execute their game plan. “That’s the part that bothers you a lot. We don’t care enough to do the things that are necessary. We don’t care enough to be a professional. We have it. I always say this about culture. I always say this about a good team being a functioning organism. It can change like that. We don’t have it right now.”
Redick also vowed that the team’s next practice will be a wake up call for the players because he is fed up with the current performances:
“We practice them all the time. Again, it goes back to what I said the other night. It’s a matter of making the choice. Too often, we have guys that don’t want to make that choice. It’s pretty consistent who those guys are. Saturday’s practice, I told the guys, it’s going to be uncomfortable. The meeting is going to be uncomfortable,” he said.
“I’m not doing another 53 games like this. Pre-game, you mentioned a stretch in March of last season where you thought maybe this was a little similar, or at least the feeling of it was similar.”
Redick has every reason to be upset as L.A. simply didn’t compete as hard as they could have against Houston. The recent trend has been the Lakers trying to make up ground for slow starts, though that is a fragile strategy when the defense is so compromised at the moment.
It’s clear that the team will need to make some roster changes in order to raise its ceiling, but the challenge for Redick and the rest of the coaching staff is to find ways to keep them from falling too far down the standings. A winnable game against the Sacramento Kings is coming up on Sunday and it’ll be interesting to see if Redick can get the Lakers to respond the right way.
JJ Redick called out anonymous Lakers player
Redick is adamant that he and the Lakers players have a good understanding of what’s expected of them and their knowledge of the scheme. However, Redick recently called out an anonymous player for now knowing what the defensive term “flood” meant in the middle of a game, so there’s clearly room for improvement.
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