JJ Redick is being tested early on in his first year as the Los Angeles Lakers head coach.
Redick has seen his team suffer some bad losses the past couple of weeks, but they hit their lowest point after a blowout loss to the Miami Heat on Wednesday night.
The Heat outplayed the Lakers in every area and put the game away early in the third quarter behind a Tyler Herro barrage from deep. Ultimately, they suffered a 134-93 defeat and seem completely lost on the floor.
After the game, head coach JJ Redick lamented their performance and called for ownership from the players, via Spectrum SportsNet:
“There has to be some ownership,” Redick said. “I think when a group is not performing well, which happens, and it happens to bad teams, it happens to good teams, it happens to great teams, you can splinter. And it’s easy to not want the ownership, particularly when it’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassed, we’re all embarrassed. It’s not a game that I thought we had the right fight, the right professionalism. Not sure what was lost in translation, but there has to be some ownership on the court. I’ll take all the ownership in the world. This is my team and I lead it. I’m embarrassed. But I can’t physically get us organized. I can’t physically be into the basketball. I can’t physically talk and call out reds and physically call our coverages. And by the way, I’m not blaming players. I own this. I own this. But gonna need some ownership on the court as well. There’s not a sense from me that we’re together right now. And that’s what we say in the huddle, but it doesn’t feel that way. We’re in a tough stretch. We’re all trying to find it.”
Redick also explained what he needs from LeBron James and Anthony Davis to get through this rough patch:
“LeBron and I spoke this morning, we had a nice conversation, one of the many we’ve had. I thought, to be honest with you, I don’t know what he scored tonight or whatever, but he was very talkative with his teammates, he was encouraging them. I need him to uplift his teammates because a lot of us, we’re going through it right now.
“I think with AD, he’s not had the performances that he had to start the year off and there’s a level of frustration. He’ll get out of it. I have no doubt, he’ll get out of it. We say this with most teams because most teams now with the new rules, they just bullshit and say we gotta be physical on both sides of the ball, but I think to start the game, they really took us out of what we were trying to do and we didn’t match that level of physicality and that can sort of get frustrating for a player.”
While Redick might be preaching the right things, something isn’t sticking with the players as their effort and competitive spirit were completely absent against the Heat. The end of the road trip is on Friday against the Atlanta Hawks and it’ll be interesting to see if Redick can shake the Lakers out of their funk.
JJ Redick suggests LeBron James playing all 82 games may not be for him or Lakers
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