The place the place JJ Redick desires to be, the basketball court docket, affords construction. The traces that mark the perimeter of the court docket differentiate between in bounds and out of bounds. The principles of the sport be sure that craft is rewarded.
That place, the court docket, made Redick a star — the all-time main scorer in Duke basketball historical past. It made him wealthy — practically $118 million in wage earned from the Orlando Magic, Milwaukee Bucks, Clippers, Philadelphia 76ers, New Orleans Pelicans and Dallas Mavericks.
However that place didn’t lead Redick to the bench with the Lakers, a minimum of not solely. The precise street that led Redick to the Lakers has been lined with coaxial cables, modems and Wi-Fi indicators, and is painfully and, at occasions, fantastically structureless.
When the Lakers employed Redick because the twenty ninth head coach in workforce historical past this spring, they bought greater than a former faculty star, greater than a lottery choose who needed to carve out a job as one of many league’s prime shooters earlier than turning into a valued veteran chief. They signed up for a partnership with a pioneer of basketball’s alternate realities of the web.
However now, JJ Redick is able to unplug.
“You will not see me tweet or post anything on IG,” Redick instructed The Instances.
He’ll not host any of the podcasts together with his ThreeFourTwo Productions. He is not going to proceed his basketball-strategy present, “Mind the Game,” with LeBron James. He is not going to work together together with his 328,700-some-odd followers on X or submit content material for his 366,000 followers on Instagram.
He hasn’t posted on both since June.
“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 stated two weeks earlier than his first coaching 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.”
To be clear, Redick isn’t going completely underground. He’s give up social media earlier than and located the expertise to be releasing, returning to the area solely as he transitioned from NBA participant to skilled broadcaster and commentator.
“It’s a dark place,” Redick stated of social media to Bleacher Report in 2018. “It’s not a healthy place. It’s not real. It’s not a healthy place for ego … if we’re talking about some Freudian s—. It’s just this cycle of anger and validation and tribalism. It’s scary, man.”
Now, forward of his first yr because the Lakers coach, which formally opens Monday with the workforce’s media day, Redick is steadfast in once more leaving that darkish place — a minimum of as a participant.
“I took a two-year break and it was great,” he stated. “But you have to understand, for me and what I was doing with the podcast and with ESPN, I had to have a social media account and I had to follow … I’m a weeds person. I wanted to know all of the discourse. If I’m going to be commentating on the discourse on ‘First Take’ or if I’m going to be commentating on the discourse on my podcast, I want to know what the discourse was.”
JJ Redick, sitting courtside at a Summer season League sport in Las Vegas, turned the Lakers coach partly due to his capability to dissect the sport as a podcaster.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Instances)
“Some of it can be fun if it’s a bit,” he acknowledged.
Redick can brush off his upcoming social media absence, however there’s no denying the position his presence on-line performed in his post-playing days, the one which’s now bought him teaching James and the Lakers.
In 2016, he turned the primary NBA participant to host a weekly podcast in season when he agreed to hitch Yahoo Sports activities and Adrian Wojnarowski’s “The Vertical.” A yr later, he went to Invoice Simmons’ website, The Ringer, the place he launched a podcast that booked company from Joel Embiid to James Corden to Kyrie Irving to Thierry Henry within the first batch of reveals.
He left to start out his personal manufacturing firm and a brand new podcast, “The Old Man and the Three” (a Hemingway pun), in 2020 and amassed greater than 1 million subscribers.
Jason Gallagher, a producer who labored with Redick at The Ringer and left for a job at “The Old Man and the Three,” stated he noticed first-hand that any preconceived notions he might need had about Redick — the sorta Nineteen Eighties film dangerous man persona he carved out for himself as a star at Duke — had been shortly erased.
“He’s been in a lot of sports fans lives like for, for years and years and years. And so you have a preconceived notion of him … like, there’s no way me and this guy are going to ever vibe like, you know what I mean? … And, I was just very quickly surprised by how open and kind and normal he can kind of be.”
Redick impressed Gallagher with how a lot he trusted the producer when it got here to concepts for the present and with how a lot work he put in to creating certain all of the granular particulars had been nearly as good as they could possibly be.
“I’m not kidding. He would call me random-ass nights when I’m laying in bed with my wife watching ‘Shark Tank,’ and he’s just like calling me to talk to me about like Memphis’ whatever, like what they’re doing on offense, and I’m like, ‘Know your audience, bro.’”
The obsession and the humanity got here via in his work, when Redick one way or the other walked a line the place he was supremely assured in his opinions and experiences whereas additionally being wildly curious sufficient to work together with pretty nameless “footwork gurus” who run social media accounts dissecting what’s and isn’t a journey.
“It’s his commitment to basketball,” Gallagher stated. “It’s really a fascinating thing to me. It really genuinely is. And that’s why I think he is gonna be great. Like he doesn’t just love the game He doesn’t just love like all of the stuff that comes with being the Lakers coach, this sort of fame, the notoriety, whatever. Like I actually believe he has a kinship to the sport of basketball that is so pure. That’s why I have so much faith in him in this new endeavor.”
When the Lakers launched Redick as their coach this summer season, the workforce didn’t particularly say something about how he gained them over together with his tweets or YouTube movies. However the noise he made within the area definitely made him a novel candidate, providing examples of his philosophies in lieu of any precise on-court work the workforce may decide.
“When we set out on the journey to name the next Lakers coach, we really had in mind concepts around innovation and challenging ourselves to be forward thinking,” common supervisor Rob Pelinka stated. “I think in industry in general and in sports in specific, sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in patterns of being in a sea of same, a sea of sameness and doing the same thing that everybody else is doing. But when we embarked on this search, it was really important for us to see if we could do something a little bit different.”
And somebody who podcasted and posted his method right into a job, Redick’s path has definitely slightly bit completely different.
As he stands on the sides of the primary days of his new profession, one he’s hellbent on conquering, he’s shifting with as away from a thoughts as attainable. He works with a number of psychological coaches, together with a efficiency coach and a mindset coach.
“This spring, post bump to the (ESPN ‘A’ broadcast) team, post LeBron podcast launching, post coaching rumors and some things that never got reported on — there was another substantial opportunity in a different organization that wasn’t coaching related — when all of that was happening, we talked through all the different pulls on my life.”
New Lakers coach JJ Redick is interviewed on the workforce’s coaching facility the day of his introductory information convention.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Instances)
And there was simply no method that social media was going to be one among them.
“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 stated. “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 began to snigger, virtually as if he may think about the pinging of his telephone after his sideline conduct bought dissected.
“There are going to be memes and GIFs [of me] for sure,” he stated. “It’s inevitable.”
He simply gained’t be the one posting them.
