When the Los Angeles Lakers decided to hire JJ Redick as their next head coach, it was immediately met with skepticism and criticism.
Despite several Lakers players publicly praising Redick, much of that criticism persists months later.
The latest to pile on is former three-time NBA All-Star Steve Francis, who talked about the matter on “Live From the District.”
“I love basketball, but there’s no way that just because he went to Duke, and he criticizes people on television like he sounds like a great coach,” Francis said.
“But I look at it like all these other guys who put a lot of significant work in, you have my boy David Vanterpool here in Washington, you have Sam Cassell, you have so many guys who have championship experience. All these guys who have experience and get looked over just because it’s the ‘it’ thing right now with generation cuz these guys are doing these podcasts.”
Redick hosted “The Old Man and the Three” podcast which had more than one million subscribers, making it one of the top basketball podcasts on the Internet. He also launched the “Mind the Game” podcast with LeBron James in March, and that quickly amassed more than 600,000 subscribers before he took over as Lakers head coach.
While the subscriber count doesn’t necessarily mean a host or co-host would make a good head coach, it’s not as if Redick has no actual basketball experience. He was a dominant player at Duke — so much so that his number was retired by the school. Redick then spent 15 seasons in the NBA.
Still, Francis says, Redick has no experience as a coach at any level and guys with more impressive resumes continue to be passed over. Francis also believes he won’t be able to command the locker room.
“The thing that’s going to happen is just like Darvin Ham was the coach. LeBron is not going to listen to not one word JJ is saying,” added Francis. “Why would you listen to him? I wouldn’t listen to him if he was coaching me. I’ll just look at how much I bake him and be like, ‘What are you saying? You know what I do, so talk to somebody else.’
“So it’s definitely going to be hard for him to get through and the camaraderie with the circus around him and his son, it’s going to be a lot of distraction for a rookie coach and we’ll see what happens.”
At the end of the day, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. The Lakers made their decision, Redick is their guy and in rather short order we’ll all find out of he’s made for the job or if Francis and the other critics were right from the jump.
