LOS ANGELES — It’s not the final exam, but this test will be a major percentage of JJ Redick’s grade.
It’s timed, as these things are, so we’re going to find out soon how prepared he is.
Three consecutive blowout losses – to the Clippers, the Phoenix Suns and, on Thursday, the Houston Rockets, who delivered a demoralizing 119-96 Christmas disaster – aren’t the first test in the tenure of the Lakers’ second-year coach.
Last season, he got to show us how he could navigate a slow start, a major trade and a superstar’s midseason hiatus. And we gave him passing marks before he failed the final in his first go at the playoffs, the Minnesota Timberwolves issuing the Lakers a 4-1 first-round loss.
But most of those assessments were quizlets compared to what what he’s got in front of him right now, after his Lakers delivered the sole stinker on the slate of NBA Christmas games that are supposed to showcase the best teams in the league.
Redick is the steward of a team willing to acknowledge it isn’t playing hard enough to have any hope of making up for its natural deficiencies, and there are plenty up and down a roster filled with almost entirely with one-way threats. The Lakers are composed mostly of scorers who can’t defend or defenders who can’t score – or who don’t, or if they do, don’t do it often enough.
Redick said he thinks it’s because that’s hard to do.
The hyper-competitive Redick, bristling after the loss, said in his abbreviated four minutes of postgame comments Thursday that the Lakers have “too many guys who don’t want to make that choice” to dig deep and will themselves to do the hard things.
That the men who play for him aren’t willing to give the outsized effort it’ll take for an older, less-athletic team to hang with the league’s younger, more athletic teams that are taking off all around them.
Being reminded of that often enough of that gulf seems to have taken the air out of a Lakers team that started the season on a much happier trajectory.
On Dec. 4, the Lakers were 16-5 and in the second-best team in the Western Conference.
Following Thursday’s uninspired defeat, they’re 19-10 and fifth and fading fast, or maybe freefalling if they can’t figure out the answers before time’s up.
Redick said it’s a vibes thing, which isn’t actually much of a revelation for anyone who watched the Lakers’ lack of communication on defense Thursday, as well as their lack of looking for one another on offense.
“You know, we had it,” Redick said. “I always say this about culture, I always say this about the team being a good team, being a functioning organism – it can change like that.” As in, in a snap of his fingers.
“We don’t have it right now.”
But then he also said his team – veteran-laden and stacked with superstars – “doesn’t care enough to be a professional.”
I don’t know whether Redick is going to get a passing mark for that sharing that sentiment with the class. I’m just the proctor, but it seems possible that the professionals in the class won’t appreciate that line of argument.
Especially while Redick, their leader, seems stumped about how to puzzle out rotations more effectively. Because he hasn’t force-fed an offense plays that effectively keep it from freelancing forlornly.
Because he hasn’t found more opportunities to get guys not named Luka Doncic, LeBron James and Austin Reaves going in a way that might help energize them do all the dirty work, all the hard stuff he and they know needs to be done.
It’s a difficult test, for sure, even for a Duke guy – especially because he seems stumped as to why the players in his charge won’t just perform like they practice, why they can’t remember what they studied on their homework.
It’s multiple choice, he said, and they keep choosing wrong.
“We practice them all the time, it’s a matter of making the choice,” Redick said. “And too often we have guys that don’t want to make that choice. And it’s pretty consistent who those guys are, so at Saturday’s practice, I told the guys, it’s going to be uncomfortable.”
“And I’m not doing another 53 games like this.”
It’s a group project and a test of the man in charge at the same time, and there might be no substitute for experience. Might be no avoiding going through adversity to figure out how to go through adversity and come out the other side with a passing grade.
We’ll see how Redick scores soon enough.