The place where JJ Redick wants to be, the basketball, offers a structure. The lines that mark the perimeter of the court differentiate between in limits and out of limits. The rules of the game ensure that that craft is rewarded.
That place, the court, made Redick a star — the all-time leading scorer in Duke basketball history. It made him rich – nearly $118 million in salary earned by the Orlando Magic, Milwaukee Bucks, Clippers, Philadelphia 76ers, New Orleans Pelicans and Dallas Mavericks.
But that place did not lead Redick to the bench with the Lakersat least not alone. The actual path that led Redick to the Lakers was littered with coaxial cables, modems and Wi-Fi signals, and is painfully and, at times, beautifully unstructured.
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 as one of the league’s leading shooters before becoming a valuable veteran leader. . They signed for a partnership with a pioneer of the alternate realities of internet basketball.
But now, JJ Redick is ready to disconnect.
“You won’t see me tweet or post anything on IG,” Redick told The Times.
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He will no longer host any of the podcasts with his ThreeFourTwo Productions. He will not continue his basketball strategy show, “Mind the Game,” with LeBron James. He won’t be interacting with his 328,700-odd followers on X or posting content for his 366,000 followers on Instagram.
He also hasn’t posted since June.
“I think there’s a lot of benefits to social media and Twitter. The bandwidth that I have, where I have to be … you have to understand this as well, and I’ve talked to some of my close friends who are head coaches, my bandwidth when you have the kids, there’s got to be an intentionality about your time when you’re at home. And my time at the office,” Redick said two weeks before his first training camp as a head coach. “We talked as a staff this weekend about efficiency. Everything I do has to be efficient. Spending time on Twitter is not an efficient use of my time as a head coach.”
To be clear, Redick is not going completely underground. He left social media before and found the experience to be freeing, returning to the space only when 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 s—. It’s just this cycle of anger and validation and tribalism. It’s scary, man.”
Now, ahead of his first year as the Lakers’ coach, which officially opens Monday with the team’s media day, Redick is firmly leaving 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 did with the podcast and with ESPN, I had to have a social media account and I had to follow … I’m a weed. I wanted to know the whole discourse. If I’m going to comment on the discourse on ‘First Take’ or if I’m going to comment on the discourse on my podcast, I want to know what the discourse was.”
To be clear, there was more to it than that. Redick would explain and defend positions, sometimes to former NBA players like Eddie Johnson, who like Redick, worked in the media. And sometimes, he would get into a back and forth discussion with unknown figures like @TheDressedLlama.
“Some of it can be fun if it’s a little bit,” he acknowledged.
Redick may brush off his upcoming absence from social media, but there’s no denying the role his online presence played in his post-game days, the one that now has him coaching James and the Lakers.
In 2016, he became the first NBA player to host a weekly podcast in a season when he agreed to join Yahoo Sports and Adrian Wojnarowski’s “The Vertical.” A year later, he went to Bill Simmons’ website, The Ringer, where he launched a podcast that booked guests from Joel Embiid to James Corden to Kyrie Irving to Thierry Henry in the first set of shows.
He left to start his own production company and new podcast, “The Old Man and the Three” (Hemingway pun), in 2020 and has amassed over 1 million subscribers.
Jason Gallagher, a producer who worked with Redick on The Ringer and left for a role on “The Old Man and the Three,” said he saw firsthand that any prejudices he may have had about Redick — the sort of 1980s movie bad guy. a person he had carved out for himself as a star at Duke — were quickly dismissed.
“He is in many sports fans as live for years and years and years. And so you have a preconceived idea of him … like, there’s no way me and this guy will ever see like, you know what I mean? … And I was just very quickly surprised by how open and kind and normal he can be.”
Redick impressed Gallagher with how much he trusted the producer when it came to ideas for the show and with how much work he put in to make sure all the nitty-gritty details were as good as they could be.
“I’m not kidding. He would call me random nights when I’m laying in bed with my wife watching ‘Shark Tank,’ and he’s like calling me to talk to me like Memphis, whatever, like what they’re doing offensively, and I’m like, ‘Know your audience, bro.’”
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The obsession and the humanity collided in his work, as Redick somehow walked a line where he was supremely confident in his opinions and experiences while also being curious enough to interact with fairly anonymous “footwork gurus” who run social media accounts dissecting what’s what. and there is no journey.
“It’s his commitment to basketball,” Gallagher said. “It’s a really fascinating thing for me. It really is true. And that’s why I think he’s going to be great. Like he doesn’t just love the game, He doesn’t just love like all the things that come with being the coach of the Lakers, that kind of fame, the notoriety, whatever. Like I actually believe he has a kinship to the sport of basketball that is so pure. That’s why I trust him so much in this new endeavor.”
When the Lakers introduced Redick as their coach this summer, the team didn’t specifically say anything about how he beat them through his tweets or YouTube videos. But the noise he made in space certainly made him a unique candidate, offering examples of his philosophies rather than any actual on-court work the team could judge.
“When we set out on the journey to name the next Lakers coach, we really had in mind concepts of innovation and challenging ourselves to be forward thinking,” general manager. Rob Pelinka said “I think in industry in general and in sports specifically, sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in patterns of being in a sea of sameness, a sea of sameness and doing the same thing that everyone else is doing. But when we started this search, it was really important for us to see if we could do something a little different.”
And someone who podcasted and posted his way into work, Redick’s path is definitely a little different.
As he stands on the edges of the first days of his new career, which he is determined to conquer, he moves with as clear a mind as possible. He works with multiple mental coaches, including a performance coach and a mindset coach.
This summer, when he suddenly found himself pushed back to the forefront of news cycles for the first time since he was the unhinged scoring sensation in the ACC, Redick felt uneasy with a moment that was “Truman Show-y,” he said.
“This spring, post to the (ESPN ‘A’ broadcast) team, post LeBron’s podcast launch, post coaching rumors and some things that have never been reported — it was another big opportunity in a different organization that wasn’t related to training – when all of that happened, we talked through all the different pulls on my life.”
And there was absolutely no way that social media was going to be one of them.
“You think about this job and what is required in this job, and one of the things that is required is self-motivation, as well as the ability to motivate other people. Another thing that is necessary is to have a clear head,” he said. “So for me, I don’t need external motivation. I let that go at one point at Duke. I just let go of that aspect of it and the emotional highs and lows of that. It’s nice. You remove that.
“The clear-minded thing is very important because ultimately it’s the people in the coaches’ room with me as we self-review and project and look ahead and look back, whatever we do with that specific day’s task, it has to come from within that room And we have to be clear-minded about, ‘Hey guys, Joe Smith47198 said we’re doing a bad job calling time.’ I think if we do a bad job of calling timeouts, we’ve probably come up with that ourselves.”
Then Redick paused and started laughing, almost as if he could imagine the tip of his phone after his lateral demeanor dissected.
“There will be memes and GIFs [of me] sure,” he said. “It’s inevitable.”
He just won’t be the one to post them.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
