The Los Angeles Lakers opened up the preseason against the Minnesota Timberwolves in Palm Desert on Friday night, suffering a 124-107 loss in the head coaching debut of JJ Redick.
Key players like LeBron James and Anthony Davis didn’t play so it’s hard to take too much away from the game, but Redick discussed what stood out to him in the loss.
“There’s a lot that stood out,” he began. “I think if you just look at the game in its entirety, we got destroyed in the possession battle. Turnovers and offensive rebounds. I think they took 15 more shots than us. In some ways, that’s the game right there. Their physicality and look, we were at a little bit of a deficit. They’re a big team. They have big defenders. [Luka] Garza, I mean, he’s a monster. Tonight, with how we opted to do the rotations in the first half. We oftentimes had a small on him, and he really hurt us.
“Having said that, I think there was a lot of good stuff that we did. I told our guys before the game three things I’m going to judge you on and how we are going to measure this game are organization, our talk and our level of compete. And I thought the third one, we had that at a really high level. The other two, we got to get better. I think schematically defensively. We can do some things better. This was not a game-plan game for us. There was some stuff that, frankly, in three days of practice in walkthrough and shootaround, you are just not going to be able to cover.
“But overall, I think our guys played with the right intent. I thought offensively, we really moved the basketball well at times, and we got off to a slow start there. And sometimes that can hurt your defense, but yeah, there’s a lot of good things we can take away from this game.”
The Lakers were short on frontcourt depth and the Timberwolves are a big team, so it wasn’t surprising to see Redick’s team get killed down low and on the glass.
It became clear early that the Lakers are going to play a different style of basketball under Redick as five of their first seven shot attempts were 3-pointers. When asked about his team’s shot profile on Friday night, Redick didn’t like one aspect of it.
“Too many floaters,” Redick said. “But you are also talking about the defense that was No. 1 in the league last year that has disruptive defenders and size, and they make you take those shots. Again, we’ll clean some of this stuff up, but yeah, too many floaters.”
Redick has already shown that he will be a very analytical coach, wanting him team to focus on 3-pointers, layups and free throws. There were signs of that in the preseason opener, but it will be interesting to see just how far the Lakers’ shot profile shifts to those three shot types moving forward.
JJ Redick went over Lakers’ identity in meeting with players
Before training camp even got underway, new head coach JJ Redick met with his players in a productive meeting to go over some things, including what their identity will be this upcoming season.
“It was good. The reason I did that, one of the things that I’m big on is efficiency,” Redick said following the Lakers’ first practice. I haven’t been around LeBron a ton, but I know that’s big for him as well. And I think as any NBA player will tell you, they really value their time. And I did not want to take time today to have some long meetings. So I used last night as a meeting to just set the tone for who we’re gonna be on both ends of the floor and the things that we’re gonna value as a group. That’s really what last night was about.”
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