PHOENIX — JJ Redick said he’d try to give himself grace.
But he’s too self-aware, even predicting before the Lakers’ first game of the season that it’d drive him crazy when they’d lose.
The Lakers, and the public, got a closer look at what that looks like one week into the season.
After their 109-105 loss to the Phoenix Suns on Monday at Footprint Center, the Lakers coach took the blame for multiple factors that led to his team’s defeat after three wins to start the season.
And the locker room appreciated Redick for it.
“He let out a nice little F word, which just shows how much he cares,” Lakers guard Austin Reaves said of Redick’s postgame demeanor. “His passion is on another level. You can tell every single second of every day that he’s locked into the betterment of our group.”
Redick’s frustration was palpable when speaking with reporters postgame.
Within that frustration was also introspection, with the 40-year-old coach taking accountability for the Lakers’ 14-point second quarter and not blitzing Kevin Durant earlier in the fourth quarter.
Durant scored eight of his 30 points in two minutes by hunting switches onto smaller Lakers’ defenders late in the game to help the Suns seal the win.
“If there’s one thing to nitpick, it’s probably me,” Redick said. “I probably should have gone to the ‘fire’ a possession or two earlier against KD. But I liked that group that we had out there defensively. I trust those guys.
“And then the other thing I would say is, like, we should never have a 14-point quarter. So that’s on me as well. Part of that is me. I gotta make sure we’re running good offense. I felt like it was a little random. We got stalled out. We talked about it at halftime. For us to be a high-level offense, we gotta move bodies and we gotta move the ball. They gotta screen.”
Redick’s self-accountability was felt by the players in the locker room privately before Redick took the blame publicly
“He’s pissed,” Anthony Davis said. “Said it’s on him if you guys ever score 14 in a quarter.”
Redick’s approach made it easier for the players to look inward, too.
“It’s on all of us, not just him,” Davis said. “Obviously he’s a coach and he’s gonna try to take the blame. But we scored 14 points. The players, right? It’s things that we could have did better as a group, coaching staff and players, but we didn’t. We learned from it, we’ll watch film on it and how we can not have another 14-point quarter this season and learn from our mistakes.
“But he’s pretty pissed. We’re all pissed. Just because of how well we’re playing and no one likes to lose. Everyone in here is a competitor, where any loss you take a pretty heavy.”
Reaves added: “It’s what a leader does. I guarantee if you go around the locker room and you ask guys what they could have [done] better to help us, I know for sure [there are] multiple things that I know I could have [done]. So you just got a locker room full of guys that take accountability and just enjoy the process of trying to get better. When you have a problem, you got to recognize you got the problem first. So you gotta take it like a man and figure out what you can do to be better.”
The Lakers (3-1) will continue their five-game trip that started in Phoenix with a matchup against the undefeated Cleveland Cavaliers (4-0) on Wednesday.
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Similar to the 2019-20 iteration of the Lakers that won the NBA championship, this year’s team has adopted the goal of not losing multiple games in a row. The 2019-20 team had only three losing streaks that season.
“You just want to be able to bounce back and not let the snowball turn into an avalanche, obviously, when it comes to the loss column,” LeBron James said. “So we’re still in the process, we’re still getting to know our system, still getting to know each other out there on the floor. But we want to be able to not let losses come in bunches.”
LAKERS at CAVALIERS
When: 7 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, Cleveland
TV/radio: Spectrum SportsNet/710 AM