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Welcome to our annual Lakers season in review series, where we’ll look back at each player on the team’s roster this season and evaluate if they should be part of the future of the franchise. Today, we wrap our series with a shift away from the players and towards the head coach, JJ Redick.
Maybe it’s a product of the internet-fueled brain rot that distorts the passage of time these days, but it feels like five years have passed since the debates about JJ Redick’s qualifications to be an NBA head coach, spurred on by his post-playing days podcast career and never having coached at any level beyond his grade-school-aged sons’ teams.
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Or maybe it’s the fact that after two full NBA campaigns under his belt, Redick has so quickly and thoroughly dismissed those concerns as irrelevant, it seems like ancient history that ever mattered in the first place.
Either way, it’s no small feat that Redick has put all of that talk behind him to the point that it is hard to imagine him doing anything else besides coaching now. Consecutive 50-win seasons and playoff appearances with home court advantage in the first round do have a way of shifting the perception of a coach under the type of scrutiny Redick was just two years ago.
The degree to which this matters at this point may not be very much at all.
After all, I think JJ would be the first to tell you that, beyond even the wins and losses, he simply wants to be judged on whether he has maximized the group of players he coaches in a specific season. But the fact that we’ve gotten to that point with Redick at all this early into his career is worth mentioning as meaningful — and the fact that this seems to be the only standard he’s being held to at all now even more so.
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Yes, there have been growing pains and things have been far from perfect, but I think it’s abundantly clear now that Redick is viewed only as a coach. And, after two seasons, it’s fairly clear he’s a pretty good one.
How did he coach?
Coming off a rookie season that saw his roster upended by a franchise-altering trade, Redick’s second year was also a challenging one due to injuries and…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/jj-redick-successful-second-season-152400613.html
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Publish date : 2026-06-17 15:24:00
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