The Los Angeles Lakers are reportedly looking to JJ Redick to help them achieve their championship dreams.
ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski reported on Thursday that the two sides agreed to a four-year contract that would name Redick the team's next head coach. Shams Charania, Sam Amick, Jovan Buha The contract was reported to be worth “approximately $8 million per season.”
Wojnarowski added that Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka has been “impressed with Redick's ability to connect with players and his basketball IQ and is confident surrounding Redick with an elite coaching staff will shorten his learning curve in his first coaching job.”
Redick had long been rumored to be a candidate for Los Angeles' head coaching position, but the team refocused its attention on him after University of Connecticut coach Dan Hurley turned down a six-year, $70 million offer to join the team.
“The Lakers moved to the forefront of this search a week ago after they were ultimately rebuffed in their bid to acquire University of Connecticut coach Dan Hurley,” Wojnarowski reported, according to the ESPN analyst.
Redick was by far the biggest wild card in the Lakers' coaching search.
The retired three-point specialist quickly rose to fame in media circles thanks to his keen analytical skills, and he is now using that experience to serve as a short-lived Beware of games A podcast with Lakers star LeBron James.
Still, this is a big gamble for Los Angeles: Redick may know a lot about basketball, but he has yet to coach in the NBA and now he's about to take on one of the most demanding jobs in the league.
Two things were true for the Lakers after the 2023-24 season: It was time for Darvin Ham to leave, and not all of the team's failures were the fault of the coaching staff.
Shortly after the team was eliminated in the first round of the playoffs, Charania, Buha and Amick of The Athletic wrote a lengthy postmortem piece expressing their dissatisfaction with Ham. His rotations have been puzzling at times, and he Something was missing Being the frontman for such a huge franchise requires PR acumen.
But the biggest problem facing the Lakers is a flawed roster built around an aging superstar and players who have struggled to get on the court in the past, and it's not immediately clear what they can do to significantly improve their championship chances.
James and Anthony Davis each played in over 70 games and performed at a high level.
James averaged 25.7 points, 7.3 rebounds and 8.3 assists while shooting a career-best 41.0 percent from the 3-point line, while Davis averaged 24.7 points, 12.6 rebounds and 2.3 blocks per game but was understandably unhappy about not being named as a finalist for Defensive Player of the Year.
To win their 18th NBA title, the Lakers need their two best players to stay healthy and play like All-Stars, and that's exactly what happened for L.A., only to collapse as usual in their first-round series against the No. 7 seed in the Western Conference and the defending champion Denver Nuggets.
Say what you will about Ham, but there's only so much a coach can strategize when Austin Reeves and D'Angelo Russell are the third- and fourth-best players in a postseason series against a true championship contender.
If James was younger, he could carry this team even further. He was probably a worse supporting player during his first tenure with the Cleveland Cavaliers. But he's not that guy anymore. His play has been slowly declining.
The concern for the Lakers going forward is that there's no guarantee James can maintain this level of production into his age-40 season, nor is there any guarantee LeBron and AD will miss just 17 games combined. If either of them regresses in any way, this team will be in serious trouble next year.
Pelinka will inevitably take some action to revamp the roster, but whatever path he chooses will involve big risks.
ESPN's Dave McMenamin reported in January that Los Angeles was already discussing a major move for a big star, citing Donovan Mitchell of the Cleveland Cavaliers and Trae Young of the Atlanta Hawks as examples.
Besides tying up the team's remaining draft capital, such a deal would likely require giving up Reeves and other slightly lesser reserve players. Building an even more top-heavy team around James and Davis has already backfired once, and that was before the new collective bargaining agreement made the superteam blueprint harder to execute.
Going in a different direction and looking to bolster his margins would allow Pelinka to use trade assets to address some of the concerns, but that strategy also seemed to be in the works before the 2023 trade deadline. Pelinka's scheme got the Lakers to the Western Conference Finals, but they still finished second to the Nuggets.
Pelinka's first order of business at the start of the offseason was to hire a new coach, but it wouldn't be his most important task.
