The place where JJ Redick wants to be, the basketball court, provides structure. The lines that demarcate the perimeter of the field distinguish between the inside and outside of the boundaries. The rules of the game ensure that crafting is rewarded.
This place, the court, made Redick a star – the all-time leading scorer in Duke basketball history. It made him rich – almost $118 million in salary earned by the Orlando Magic, Milwaukee Bucks, Clippers, Philadelphia 76ers, New Orleans Pelicans and Dallas Mavericks.
But this place did not lead Redick to the bench with the Lakersat least not only. The actual road that led Redick to the Lakers was lined with coaxial cables, modems and Wi-Fi signals, and is painfully and sometimes beautifully structureless.
When the Lakers hired Redick as the 29th head coach in team history this spring, they got more than a former college star, more than a lottery pick who had to carve out a role among the best shooters in the league before becoming a valued veteran leader. . They signed a partnership with a pioneer of alternative basketball realities on the Internet.
But now, JJ Redick is ready to pull the plug.
“You won’t see me tweeting or posting anything on IG,” Redick told the Times.
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He will no longer host any of his ThreeFourTwo Productions podcasts. He will not continue his basketball strategy show, “Mind the Game,” with LeBron James. He will not interact with his approximately 328,700 followers on X or post content for his 366,000 followers on Instagram.
He also hasn’t posted since June.
“I think there are many benefits to social media and Twitter. The bandwidth that I have where I need to be…you have to understand that too, and I’ve talked with a number of my close friends who are head coaches, my bandwidth when you have kids, there has to be intentionality about your time when you are at home. And my time in the office,” Redick said two weeks before his first training camp as head coach. “We talked as a team this weekend about efficiency. Everything I do must be effective. Spending time on Twitter is not an effective use of my time as a head coach.
To be clear, Redick isn’t going completely underground. He once left social media and found the experience liberating, returning to the space only as he transitioned from NBA player to professional broadcaster and commentator.
“It’s a dark place,” Redick said 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 bullshit, it’s just this cycle of anger, validation, and tribalism. It’s scary, man.’
Now, ahead of his first year as Lakers coach, which officially opens Monday with the team’s media day, Redick is determined to leave that dark place again — at least as a participant.
“I took a two-year break and it was great,” he said. “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 weed person. I wanted to know the whole speech. If I’m going to comment on the speech on “First Take” or if I’m going to comment on the speech on my podcast, I want to know what the speech was.
To be clear, there was more to it than that. Redick would clarify and defend his positions, sometimes to former NBA players like Eddie Johnson, who, like Redick, worked in the media. And sometimes he had exchanges with unknown personalities like @TheDressedLlama.
“Some things can be fun if it’s a little bit,” he admitted.
Redick can shrug off his upcoming social media absence, but there’s no denying the role his online presence has played in his post-playing days, one that now allows him to coach James and the Lakers.
In 2016, he became the first NBA player to host a weekly podcast during the season when he agreed to join Yahoo Sports and Adrian Wojnarowski’s “The Vertical.” A year later, he took to Bill Simmons’ site The Ringer, where he launched a podcast that booked guests ranging from Joel Embiid and James Corden to Kyrie Irving and Thierry Henry in the first series of emissions.
He left to start his own production company and a new podcast, “The Old Man and the Three” (a Hemingway pun), in 2020 and has amassed more than a million subscribers.
Jason Gallagher, a producer who worked with Redick on The Ringer and who went for a role on “The Old Man and the Three,” said he saw firsthand any preconceptions he might have had about Redick – the villain of the 1980s film. The persona he carved out for himself as a star at Duke – was quickly erased.
“He’s been a part of many sports fans’ lives for years and years. And so you have a preconceived idea of him… like, there’s no way that me and this guy could ever vibe like, you know what I mean? …And I was very quickly surprised at how open, kind and normal he can be.
Redick impressed Gallagher with his trust in the producer with the show’s ideas and the work he put into making sure all the granular details were as good as they could be .
“I’m not kidding. He calls me an asshole on nights when I’m in bed with my wife watching “Shark Tank,” and he just calls me to tell me about Memphis, whatever, what they’re doing on offense, and I tell me: “Know your audience, brother. »
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Obsession and humanity showed up in his work, when Redick sort of followed a line where he was extremely confident in his opinions and experiences while being curious enough to interact with quite “footwork gurus” anonymous people who run social media accounts dissecting what is. and it’s not a trip.
“It’s his commitment to basketball,” Gallagher said. “It’s a really fascinating thing to me. It really is. And that’s why I think he’s going to be great. Like he didn’t just love the game, he didn’t just love everything that came with being coach of the Lakers, that kind of fame, notoriety, whatever. I think he has such a pure connection to basketball. This is why I have so much confidence in him in this new company.
When the Lakers introduced Redick as coach this summer, the team said nothing specifically about how he won them over with his tweets or YouTube videos. But the noise he made in space certainly made him a unique candidate, offering examples of his philosophy in lieu of any actual on-the-ground work for the team to judge.
“When we set out to name the next coach of the Lakers, we really had in mind concepts around innovation and we challenged ourselves to be forward-thinking,” the general manager said. Rob Pelinka said. “I think in the industry in general and in sport in particular, sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in a sea of sameness, an ocean of sameness and doing the same thing as everyone else. But when we embarked on this research, it was really important for us to see if we could do something a little different.
And someone who podcasted and published his way to a job, Redick’s path has certainly been a little different.
As he finds himself at the dawn of the first days of his new career, which he is determined to conquer, he moves forward with as clear a mind as possible. He works with several mental coaches, including a performance coach and a mentality coach.
This summer, when he suddenly found himself pushed to the forefront of news cycles for the first time since he was the ACC’s brash scoring sensation, Redick felt uncomfortable with a moment that was “Truman Show-y,” he said.
“This spring, after joining the (ESPN ‘A’ broadcast) team, after the LeBron podcast launched, after the coaching rumors and some things that were never reported – there was another substantial opportunity in a different organization that wasn’t related to coaching – When all this happened, we talked about all the different influences in my life.
And it just wasn’t possible for social media to be a part of it.
“You think about this job and what is required in this job, and one of the things required is self-motivation, as well as the ability to motivate others. Another thing you need is to have a clear mind,” he said. “So for me, I don’t need external motivation. I gave that up at some point at Duke. I simply let go of that aspect and the emotional ups and downs that come with it. It’s nice. You get rid of it.
“Clear-mindedness is very important because ultimately it’s the people in the coaching room with me who are self-auditing and projecting, looking forward and looking back, whatever we do with the task of on this specific day, it has to come from inside this room and we have to be clear-headed rather than saying, “Hey guys, Joe Smith47198 said we were doing a bad job calling timeouts I think so.” We’re doing a bad job of downtime, we’ve probably talked about it ourselves.”
Then Redick stopped and started laughing, almost as if he could imagine the ping of his phone after his secondary behavior was dissected.
“There will definitely be memes and GIFs (of me),” he said. “It’s inevitable.”
He is simply not the one who will publish them.
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This story was originally published in Los Angeles Times.
