The Los Angeles Lakers made an unconventional hiring in their head coaching search, bringing in former player and media personality JJ Redick despite not having any prior coaching experience.
Redick faces a lot of pressure in his first head coaching gig as he will be tasked with getting the Lakers back into championship contention despite not making any significant roster changes.
Given the nature of his new job and that he is no longer a member of the media, Redick recently told Dan Woike of the L.A. Times that he will be staying off social media this season:
“You will not see me tweet or post anything on IG,” Redick told The Times.
“I think there are many benefits for social media and Twitter. The bandwidth that I have where I have to be … you have to understand this too, and I’ve talked with a number of my close friends who are head coaches, my bandwidth when you have the kids, there has to be an intentionality about your time when you’re at home. And my time at the office,” Redick said two weeks before his first training camp as a head coach. “We talked as a staff this weekend about efficiency. Everything I do has to be efficient. Spending time on Twitter is not an efficient use of my time as a head coach.”
While he won’t be seeing it, Redick knows that criticism will be aimed his way on social media whenever he makes a poor decision:
“You think about this job and what’s required in this job, and one of the things that’s required is self-motivation, as well as the ability to motivate other people. Another thing that’s required is having a clear head,” he said. “So for me, I don’t need external motivation. I let go of that at some point at Duke. I just let go of that aspect of it and the emotional highs and lows of that. It’s nice. You get rid of that.
“The clear-minded thing is super important because it’s ultimately the people in the coaches’ room with me as we self-audit and project and look forward and look behind, whatever we’re doing with that specific day’s task, it has to come from within that room. And we have to be clear-minded versus, ‘Hey guys, Joe Smith47198 said we’re doing a bad job calling timeouts.’ I think if we’re doing a bad job of calling timeouts, we’ve probably already brought that up ourselves.”
Then Redick paused and started to laugh, almost as if he could imagine the pinging of his phone after his sideline behavior got dissected.
“There are going to be memes and GIFs [of me] for sure,” he said. “It’s inevitable.”
This is absolutely the right call for Redick, who has been doing and saying all of the right things since he took the Lakers job.
It remains to be seen if that will carry over to actual coaching, but if it does then the Lakers may have made a home run hiring.
Rob Pelinka: JJ Redick hiring wasn’t about LeBron James
One of the podcasts that JJ Redick used to host was with Lakers star LeBron James as the two have built a close relationship. Despite that, general manager Rob Pelinka recently ensured that the hiring of Redick was not about managing James’ final years, but instead about building long-term, sustainable success.
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