The Los Angeles Lakers began the 2025-26 season with a loss to the Golden State Warriors, which wasn’t a huge surprise considering LeBron James was not in the lineup on Opening Night for the first time in his career.
There were a lot of takeaways from the loss, but one of them was James’ body language on the bench with many people believing he wasn’t engaged.
It appears that wasn’t the case on Wednesday morning’s film session though as head coach JJ Redick discussed what the team went over and credited James for being vocal.
“I thought our intent on a lot of game-plan stuff was there,” Redick said of what the film session showed. “That team is a very unique team and it starts with Steph Curry. He just bends you in different ways and so, you never are going to have a perfect game in terms of game-plan execution against them. You’re just not. But I thought our intent was really good. Things we cleaned up in film and the things we cleared up in practice was very simple. Our intent to run back in transition defense and establish our first priority, which was the basket, was overall pretty good.
“We did a poor job of locating the lasers in transition, which was a point of emphasis for our defense. Buddy Hield got two 3s off in the second half. Steph got one right in front of our bench in the first half. That was literally the second priority of the game, was locating those guys in transition. So, clean that up and again talk through that.
“LeBron was very helpful. All of us kind of talked about that in film. And then the second thing was our shift. We need to, I think as a coaching staff, for the guys returning need to re-enforce and repeat some things from our shifts and what that looks like, what our close-out looks like and for the new uys creating clarift for that for them. Saw it on film. It wasn’t good. So that stuff is really controllable. So, I think… I did a 10-minute teach/talk and we drilled it just to shift and close-out clarity I think is going to be helpful for us going forward. Sometimes as a coach you say things and you drill things, but then you realize that if it’s not showing up in a game then it’s not clear. We just got to continue to re-enforce things on a clear basis.”
Redick added that James and other players speaking up during film sessions will be good for the team in the long run.
“Well I told them him asking questions, him giving his input, us having a back-and-forth is so healthy,” Redick said. “I would like to have dialogue and back-and-forth and questions every single time we do film and teach. You got a question, speak up. If you want to make a point, speak up. It was good.”
James isn’t expected back in the lineup until mid-November, but until then, he can still be a valuable resource to the team as a coach on the bench. He has arguably the highest basketball IQ of all-time, so the hope is that he will stay engaged and help out his teammates until he is able to suit up.
Austin Reaves: Lakers third quarter issues are on players
The Warriors outscored the Lakers 19-4 to begin the third quarter, which was the difference in the game. This has been a problem for this team for years and Austin Reaves puts that blame on the players themselves, not the Lakers coaches.
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