The Los Angeles Lakers are welcoming in a new era of basketball after they hired JJ Redick to be their new head coach.
Redick was the perceived frontrunner throughout the Lakers’ head coach search and will now get a chance to lead an NBA team for the first time in his career. While Redick might lack coaching experience at the professional level, he has a high basketball IQ and understands the modern NBA quite well.
A knockdown 3-point shooter during his career, Redick knows what it takes to be a high-octane offense in the league and his early comments suggest that he will be modernizing Los Angeles’ playbook. This must have been music to LeBron James’ ears as he already publicly said he’s excited to work alongside Redick and the coaching staff.
On the ESPN broadcast during the Lakers’ Las Vegas Summer League game against the Houston Rockets, Redick discussed how the team looked offensively and acknowledged that they were much more successful running organized offense versus freelancing on the floor:
“One of the things last year with this team, they played a lot of random,” Redick told Mark Jones and Doris Burke. “If you look at the efficiency numbers when they played random versus when they played out of sets, the sets had a much higher efficiency.”
Former head coach Darvin Ham and his staff had some great stretches where it seemed like the Lakers were humming offensively, but too often than not they would go long periods in the middle of games where it seemed like the players were confused as to what they were running. This problem was particularly apparent in the playoffs where Los Angeles stopped executing any sort of sets and allowed the Denver Nuggets to rattle off runs to climb back into games.
Redick went on to further discuss his plans for the Lakers’ offense:
“We have LeBron and AD on our team. Those guys are obviously going to be offensive hubs. But we are going to play with more movement, more cutting and we have to certainly get buy-in from all the players to play that way.”
It was frustrating to see the Lakers seemingly move away from what was working for them, but it sounds like Redick is already planning to keep the offense on schedule. The talent on the roster is there to be a great offensive unit, but now it’ll be up to Redick to figure out the best way to utilize his players and put them in positions to succeed.
Lakers’ Anthony Davis agrees with JJ Redick about being hub offfensively
One player who seems ready for more offensive responsibility is Anthony Davis, who showed off better passing ability last season. Redick said he wants to make Davis the hub on offense and the star big man agreed with the plan.
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