The Herd with Colin Cowherd - Hoops Tonight - Lakers Hire JJ Redick Reaction: Why "success feels inevitable" for LeBron James & LA

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Jason Timpf reacts to the Los Angeles Lakers hiring JJ Redick as their next head coach. Jason discusses the risk factor of hiring Redick, how he will work with LeBron James and Anthony Davis, and why "success feels inevitable" for Los Angeles. 4:00 - Why Reddick hire is no more “risky” than other candidates on the market 6:30 - Why Reddick’s competitive nature is an advantage 12:00 - He needs to bring accountability to the Lakers 15:00 - Lakers need to address personnel issues to succeed. (Timestamps may vary based on advertisements.) #Volume #HerdSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year.

Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Robert from the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. Joe and I are both lifelong Star Wars fan, so we're celebrating May the 4th with a brand new week of fun, thought-provoking Star Wars-related episodes. Join us as we tackle science and culture topics from a galaxy far, far away, such as the biology of tauntons and wampas on the ice planet hot, or the practicality and corporate business sense of the Sith ruling. of two.

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21 plus age varies by jurisdiction. Void in Ontario, bonus bets expire 168 hours after issuance. See dkng.com slash B ball for eligibility and deposit restrictions, terms, and responsible gaming resources. Welcome to Ups today here at the Volume. Happy Thursday, everybody. Hope all of you guys are having a great week so far. Well, JJ Reddick is the brand new head coach of the Los Angeles Loll.

Lakers. And so we're going to take 10, 15 minutes here just to give my initial impressions on the hire. You guys know the Joe before we get started. Subscribe to the Hoops Tonight YouTube channel so you don't miss any more of our videos. Follow me on Twitter at underscore Jason LT so you guys don't miss show announcements. Don't forget about our podcast feed wherever you get your podcast under Hoops tonight. And then keep dropping mailbag questions in the YouTube comments. We're actually going to hit a mailbag in tomorrow's show. So I'm going to be grabbing questions from this video as well as the video we did on Tuesday kind of wrapping up the NBA final. So drop questions in the comments. We'll to them in Tomorrow's mailbag.

All right, let's talk some basketball. So there's a bunch of different angles I want to come at this from, but I want to start from the perspective of risk because there's going to be a lot of focus on JJ's lack of experience and all of the risk that comes with that. And the reason why I have an issue with that is there's a risk, no matter who you hire in this coaching field. It's kind of the reality.

Like, ideally, you want to hire a coach that has a great amount of experience, a great amount of talent and a proven track record, right? but those guys tend to have jobs, right? There was one of them that fake came available, maybe a leverage play, not really that serious of an option, right? In Dan Hurley, you know, lots of experience, proven track record, you know,

this big personality, obviously one of the most respected basketball geniuses in the world, right? But he has a job right now, right? Like, those guys aren't just sitting around waiting to be hired. And so no matter what direction the Lakers had gone, there was risk. Let's go for a former head coach. Let's go for someone like James Barago or Kenny Atkinson.

Well, those guys had mediocre prior stops. There's no guarantee that they're going to just come into the Lakers and have a ton of success. Oh, well, what about these longtime experienced assistant coaches? Well, there's plenty of examples in NBA and NFL history of guys who were successful coordinators or successful lead assistants that transitioned to a head coaching job and then struggled. There's a certain amount of risk there as well. There was no option. It was an unavoidable part of this process that the Lakers would encounter some risk when they chose a new head coach.

And so JJ obviously fits that bill, but I didn't think that that was something that they could avoid. The focus on experience, experience is important, but not at the expense of talent. Like if you were looking at checking boxes and all the different things that you look for in a head coach, right? Like, I want a certain amount of competitiveness. Well, JJ has that. Like, what kind of person would give up their Cush media job? to take over being head coached the Lakers, which comes with much heavier workload,

much more travel, much more pressure, much more criticism. Why would you do that to yourself and your family? It's because he's obsessed with basketball. It's because he's a psychotic competitor, something that has driven him to all of the success that he's had as a basketball player. Give me talent in competitiveness any day of the week. They're going to find a way to succeed.

J.J. has the competitiveness. I do believe he has the talent. I think he's a very bright basketball mind. I think he's obsessed with modern NBA offense and all the different intricacies that make, especially five-out offense work. As we know with the Lakers, they shifted to five-out last year,

and there was some growing pains early in the year, but they really took off the second half of the year. And I even think there's another level that they could get to on that end of the floor. So by virtue of JJ's competitiveness and his desire to learn everything there is to know about five out offense, I think he's going to help that offense get to another level. So, like, he's got the competitiveness.

I personally believe he has more than enough in terms of natural talent for the job. There's a personality piece, and there's going to be some growing pains there, for sure, because I think that JJ's a really competitive guy, right? And obviously, he'll butt heads with players from time to time. And it's not going to be a perfectly seamless transition. But if you surround him with an experienced set of assistance, and as long as he has the buy-in of LeBron James, who's the most experienced star in the league,

I think that process over the next few years can be smoothed over. But in general, in terms of the core piece of it, I do believe JJ's personality is big enough. He's got enough aura in the long run to be a very successful head coach. And so honestly, as I look through it, and it's like competitiveness, you know,

personality and aura, talent, and experience. Like, obviously he's lacking in the talent and experience part, but I think he has a chance to be really, really good in the other three areas. And so again, like, experience is important, but not at the expense of talent. And you can supplement experience by surrounding him with experience, right? Like, we see this with players, too. It's like you take the 2012 Thunder, you add a Derek Fisher, you add a Kendrick Perkins. It's like, those guys aren't the dudes actually doing most of the heavy lifting, but it just provides the veteran presence that

helps those guys navigate that environment. The same thing goes for the coaching staff. as long as JJ has experienced minds that he can lean on through the process, who can confront him and be like, hey, like when you communicate this to that player, like I had this happen to me three years ago, you know, maybe next time try this, it seems to resonate better. Like, you're right about what you're thinking, but we just got to work on the delivery. You know, whatever it is, like all of those processes can be smoothed over by virtue of supplementing him with experience.

And again, I put this on my note, give me talent plus competitiveness. Just because someone's in over their head for a certain job doesn't mean they're incapable of succeeding in that job. Sometimes it can be a little intimidating and intense up front that once you break through and learn, as long as you have the talent, as long as you're competitive and work hard enough, the success to me feels inevitable. And so I think that there's a lot less risk here than what it would appear like on the surface giving the available candidates that are out there. I want to zero in on the offensive end a little bit more. So, like, again, like one of the things that I think I, and we're going to talk about this in much more detail when we do my five biggest takeaways from the postseason pod, which I was originally going to do today, but I'm probably going to end up doing tomorrow morning just by virtue of this report. But, you know, I'm a big believer that ball and player movement is important. We saw what happened with Dallas, right?

They were an elite offense for three rounds against specific types of matchups, but a couple adjustments from Boston and their offense completely fell apart. was, in my opinion, in large part, because of a lack of ball and player movement. Like, as long as they had shooters spacing in the corners, but Boston didn't have to help off of them, Dallas couldn't get consistent quality looks, right? It was a lot of ISO. It was a lot of over-the-top pull-up jump shots, right? Like, to me, ball and player movement in the five-out context is more resilient offensively in the later rounds, especially of the NBA playoffs. And the Lakers made a switch to five out last year. They've made a lot of progress on that end of the floor, but they can still get a lot better. There was even in the postseason in particular,

there were a lot of moments where the Lakers got away from their five out attack and ran a lot of just like spamming pick and roll and things along those lines. Having a coach that is kind of like, I mean this in a complimentary way, like a nerd, like kind of who will geek out about all of the different elements of modern five out offense. And there's a bunch of different ways to look at it, right? There's like sets that you run to begin possessions. There's the way you're now. five-out motion flows after the defense deals with whatever first action you run. There's off-ball action. There's counters and things along those lines. That's going to be vitally important for this Laker team, especially because they play a lot of non-shooters, guys like

Jared Vanderbilt, guys like Anthony Davis, right? So like I actually think JJ has the potential. There will be some growing pains, but because of his obsessiveness with that side of the ball, I think he can do a lot to help the team get to another level on that end of the floor. main concern and the main thing that I think JJ is going to struggle with at first, but I think he'll learn and get better at in the long run is the accountability piece. Accountability was the biggest weakness of this Laker team. What that means to me is like accepting mediocre results and remember when Darwin Ham would refer to things as like, oh, we're just in a marathon guys, like we can't overreact to everyone in loss. Like we're just trying to get through this

grind. And it's like, no, you have to attack. the regular season in order to have postseason success. That is a fact. I pulled this stat for the pod that I'm doing tomorrow on the five biggest takeaways from the postseason. Twelve of the last 13 NBA champions had a top four regular season record. And the one team that didn't was the 2021 Milwaukee Bucks. They had the seventh best record. And they were a dominant regular season team in the previous seasons. And that was that funky COVID season when guys were in and out of the lineup. If I remember correctly, Brooke Lopez missed a ton of time in that season. So like, NBA history tells us you can't chill your way through the season.

You have to attack everything from day one of training camp, establish habits, build out attention to detail. That is what will carry you to play championship level basketball down the line. That comes down to JJ. He is going to have to ride those guys in terms of their attention to detail every single day of practice, every single game, every single time out. He's going to have to be really diligent about how often he holds those guys accountable in order for this team to get where they need to go. And I think there is a challenge there when you're looking at LeBron James and it's like, dude, you're JJ Reddick. When you were playing in the league, you were a player that wasn't even in the same stratosphere as me. Like there's a certain level

of like, will JJ be able to look at LeBron and demand a lot out of him? Will he be able to look at Anthony Davis and demand a lot out of him? Will he be able to look at all those guys? That I think is going to be the hardest part. But again, as long as he has LeBron's support, I think that's going to be key. LeBron's going to have to stand behind JJ to help him hold these guys accountable. But as long as that attention to detail is there and they continue to make strides on the offensive end of the floor, I do think this is a job that JJ can succeed in. The main thing, this is the last thing I put. The coach it certainly plays a role here.

I thought Darvinham did a lot to hurt the Lakers in the regular season last year in terms of just rotation stuff. But for the most part, the Lakers' main issues are personnel related. They're not athletic enough in the back court. They do not have a starting caliber player that can both defend on the perimeter at a high level

and be a plus offensive player. That player does not exist on the roster. Like they, beyond LeBron and AD. So like honestly, the main driving force of whether or not the Lakers have a successful season is going to come down to what they do with those three draft picks, what they do in free agents, what they do just over the course of the next month to tinker with the roster. So like at the end of the day, like we can talk about JJ all we want and he, I like him as like a long-term coaching prospect with this Los Angeles

Lakers team, but they're going to have to hit some home runs in the offseason to give this Laker team a chance to compete going into next season. And I'm really curious to see whether or not they can give them the horses they need to succeed. But again, to kind of put a bow on it all, yeah, there's risk involved, but I didn't think that was an avoidable part of this process. Yes, experience is important, but not at the expense of talent. I think JJ is talented and freaky competitive. Give me a talented and freaky competitive guy in a job like this 10 times out of 10. I think he's going to find a way to figure it out and be successful. All right, guys, all I have for today. As always, I sincerely appreciate you guys for supporting the show.

We'll be back tomorrow to go over the five biggest takeaways of the postseason as well as to do a mailbag. I'll see you guys then. The volume. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter.

Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque.

Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Robert from the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast.

Joe and I are both lifelong Star Wars fan, so we're celebrating May the 4th with a brand new week of fun, thought-provoking Star Wars-related episodes. Join us as we tackle science and culture topics from a galaxy far, far away, such as the biology of tauntons and wampas on the ice planet hot, or the practicality and corporate business sense of the Sith rule of two. Listen to stuff to blow your mind on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. On the Look Back at it podcast. From 1979, that was a big moment for me. 84 was big to me. I'm Sam J. And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick you here, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it.

With our friends, fellow comedians, and favorite offers. Like Mark Lamont Hill on the 80s. It was a wild year. It was a wild year. I don't think there's a more important year for black people. Listen to look back at it on the IHeart Radio

app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what I'm saying. Yep, that's me. Clifford Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, my basketball and college football journey,

or my career in sports media. Well, now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show. This is a place for raw, unfilled of conversations with athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. So let's get to it. Listen to The Clifford Show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok podcast network on TikTok. This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed human.