The Los Angeles Lakers play their first regular season game on Tuesday night, and they’ll be in front of the home faithful to face the Minnesota Timberwolves. While a new season is always exciting, this is a particularly interesting Lakers campaign with new head coach JJ Redick at the helm.
Redick has never coached at the professional level before. But after seeing his resume as a player and the knowledge of the game that he showed in his time as a broadcaster, the Lakers felt he was the right fit to take last year’s roster to the next level, with some minor adjustments.
With the whirlwind that has been the last couple months for the first-time coach, Redick probably hasn’t had much time to reflect on his situation and look ahead. But he got a chance to do so and gave himself some advice for how to maintain his composure, via Dave McMenamin of ESPN:
“Learning not to get too high or too low. Probably not too high, that’s the challenge.”
Redick expanded on this point, saying that he’ll have to battle with his own nature of being his own biggest critic as the season inevitably hits harder times:
“The self-critical and the low points go hand in hand. If we aren’t executing, meaning the things that we’ve emphasized and the things that we talk about, are not happening or translating to the court, I tend to blame myself. I trust my coaches, so there’s not going to be like ‘why are we doing this, you guys said you coached this.’ It’s more like am I not communicating this in a clear way because it’s not happening on the court. That’s a low. Losing is a low for sure, and that’s where throughout the season, we just have to maintain as a group that this is a process. Our goal is to get better every single game, and we believe as a group if we do that and embrace that, that by the end of the regular season we’ll have a really good team and we’ll be able to contend.”
Thus far, Redick has been completely open about every step of his process and has given great insight into his state of mind as well. There should be no surprises with the way Redick intends to lead his team this season, and perhaps that will give the Lakers a boost.
Austin Reaves believes Lakers will benefit from JJ Redick’s structure
The Lakers certainly have multiple players who can take over games and really lead the team to victory, like Austin Reaves. But often times last season, it felt like the strategies and game plans were lacking and while Reaves stands to benefit from what Redick is bringing in, he feels these new structures will benefit the entire Lakers team.
“It’s not even really just for me,” Reaves added. “I just think the whole structure and foundation that these coaches have brought in for us, talking with everybody, is a great start because I feel like a lot of times last year we won a lot of games off of talent and when you have talent around structure then you have opportunities to do something really special. So I don’t think it’s necessarily for me or not, I just think that everything that they’ve came in and talked about makes sense to me for our whole collective group.”
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