LOS ANGELES — What the heck, JJ? What was that?
Look, LeBron James was right when he volunteered, after the third-seeded Lakers’ season-ending 103-96 loss to the sixth-seeded Minnesota Timberwolves on Wednesday night: Overall, JJ Redick, his former podcast partner-turned-head coach, had a great rookie season.
Fifty victories? While leading the glamour team in the NBA, the one with everyone’s eyeballs on it at all times? And doing it through major roster reconstruction, mid-stride? And staying the course valiantly, humanly through great personal loss, Redick’s family among those who lost so much in the Palisades Fire early this year?
Way impressive. A wonderful start to what will probably be a beautiful coaching career.
But what a weird ending to Year 1.
All of Redick’s accomplishments as a first-time head coach made the way this season ended – with a thud, a dud, a whimper, with a 4-1 gentleman’s sweep in a first-round Western Conference playoff series against the hungrier and center-rich Timberwolves – all the more confounding.
Because it was plagued with curious coaching decisions.
It’s one thing to encourage your team to play with desperation, it’s another to pull desperate stunts. To take desperate risks. To make moves that beg to be questioned and then either bristle at them or brush them aside, a rookie coach desperate to be taken seriously.
But there was Redick, running his favored five for an entire second half in Minnesota in a Game 4 loss on Sunday – and then shrugging off their fourth-quarter fade afterward. He talked about it Tuesday as if doing something that no one in at least 28 years had was, well, actually completely normal. And that the reason it didn’t work was that his “two best players missed layups at the rim.”
It wasn’t that they were tired, he insisted – so, not his fault. That was on them: “Don’t think they missed layups because they were tired.”
Except they probably did. James is 40; and Doncic had been sick two days earlier.
And then Redick – previously reliably accountable – really got his dander up when he was asked Wednesday whether he had thoughts about that decision, watching the game film, and whether he’d lean on any of his more experienced assistants to make rotation decisions in Game 5? It was a perfectly reasonable question related to the topic du jour in Lakerland, where the lights are always bright, and blinding in the playoffs.
His retort, before he laid down the microphone and abruptly ended his pregame news conference: “Are you saying that because I’m inexperienced and that was an inexperienced decision that I made? You think I don’t talk to my assistants about substitutions every single timeout? … that’s a weird assumption.”
Not really, but what was a weird assumption was that Maxi Kleber would be ready to make meaningful contributions in an elimination game.
Kleber, who had only just been cleared to play after recovering from foot surgery on Wednesday. The 6-foot-10 German hadn’t played NBA basketball since Jan. 25, when he was still employed by the Dallas Mavericks. He hadn’t even practiced with the Lakers.
And yet, there was Kleber – the type of floor-spacing forward/center in tune with Redick’s basketball philosophy – checking in for Austin Reaves with 2:48 to play in the first quarter. There was Kleber back on the court with the season on the line in the fourth quarter, missing a 3-point attempt and stepping out of bounds.
They were just “spot” minutes, Redick countered afterward, stressing what an intelligent player Kleber is – enough, though, to make up for sending him into the fray without a chance to find his sea legs first? It wasn’t even a fair test.
Anyone but Jaxson Hayes, whose 31 minutes over four games Redick hated so much, he glued the 7-foot lob threat to the bench with all his flaws Wednesday, when the Lakers stubbornly offered no resistance whatsoever for Rudy Gobert. The Wolves’ 7-1 Frenchman finished with 27 points and 24 rebounds in a game the Lakers still had a chance to win late, Redick pointed out.
“There’s always a tradeoff,” he said. “You can say, ‘Oh, play a center.’ But we couldn’t score, so there’s a tradeoff to everything. We put ourselves in a position to be in the game three times in the fourth quarter and just came up short every time.”
But on Wednesday, the Lakers might have been in a better position against what was probably the better team – possibly even pulling out ahead instead of nipping at the Wolves’ heels, exchanging the lead four times and tying the score three times in the fourth quarter – if they’d not continued to hemorrhage points in the paint (56) and second-chance points (20) all game.
If they hadn’t allowed 18 offensive rebounds and 11 more shots. If Gobert hadn’t gotten going like he had. If the Lakers had a dependable center, one could argue. Or if Redick had gotten even something from the position in what became a matchup nightmare?
Not getting it sapped the desperation from Redick’s players, who were getting pushed around inside, all but helpless against the bigger, longer opponents whose attacking energy never waned.
“I’m not a 5-man,” said Rui Hachimura, a forward who played some center in the playoffs. “I’m 6-8, 240 (pounds). It was tough.”
Still, Hachimura – a bright spot for the Lakers in Game 5, shooting 5 for 8 from 3-point range en route to 23 points – credited Redick and his staff for believing in him, for trusting him this season, for helping him improve.
James complimented Redick too, acknowledging that his guy didn’t have all the answers in Year 1: “JJ is going to continue to grow. He had a hell of a campaign for a rookie coach. It’s already hard being a rookie coach in the NBA, but it’s a hell of a lot harder being a rookie coach of the Lakers. That’s a whole ’nother ballgame. And I thought he handled it extremely well. Just learned every single day. He held us accountable. He pushed us. That was pretty cool.”
And Redick, too, acknowledged that this first season leaves room for improvement – whether or not it’s in those areas we kept nagging him about this week: “I know I can be better and I know I will get better,” he said. “… but there’s always ways to get better. And I can get a lot better.”
Hey, for what it’s worth, a rookie Kobe Bryant once shot four airballs in five minutes in an elimination game. And he got quite a lot better.
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