Lakers and JJ Redick agree to 4-year deal with HC amid LeBron James Buzz

The Los Angeles Lakers are reportedly turning to JJ Redick to help them achieve their championship aspirations.

Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN reported that the two sides agreed to a four-year contract to make Redick the team’s next head coach on Thursday. The one from Athletic Shams Charania, Sam Amick and Jovan Buha reported the deal to be “in the neighborhood of $8 million per season.”

Wojnarowski added that Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka “was sold on Redick’s ability to connect with the players and his basketball IQ and believes that surrounding Redick with an elite coaching staff will short learning curve in his first coaching job.”

Redick had long been a rumored candidate for LA’s head coaching job, and the franchise turned its attention back to him after UConn head coach Dan Hurley turned down a six-year, $70 million offer. dollars to join the organization.

The ESPN analyst “moved to the forefront of the search a week ago after the Lakers’ pursuit of Connecticut coach Dan Hurley was ultimately rejected,” Wojnarowski reported.

Redick was by far the biggest wild card in the Lakers’ coaching search.

The retired three-point specialist has quickly become prominent in the media ecosystem for his nuanced analysis. He used this in what will now be the short run of the Mind The Game podcast with Lakers star LeBron James.

Still, this is a big bet by Los Angeles. As much as he knows about the game, Redick has yet to work in any coaching role in the NBA, and now he’s about to take on one of the league’s most demanding jobs.

Two things were true after the Lakers’ 2023-24 season ended: It was time for Darvin Ham to go, and not all of the team’s mistakes were on the coaches.

Shortly after the team was eliminated in the first round of the playoffs, Charania, Buha and Amick of The Athletic wrote a lengthy postmortem that exposed frustrations with Ham. His spins were sometimes confusing too the necessary was missing public relations expert, who must be a front figure for such a massive franchise.

However, the biggest problem facing the Lakers is that they have a flawed roster centered around an aging superstar and another who has struggled to stay on the floor in the past. And it’s not immediately clear what they can do to significantly improve their championship chances.

James and Anthony Davis each appeared in over 70 games and both performed at high levels.

James averaged 25.7 points, 7.3 rebounds and 8.3 assists and shot a career-high 41.0 percent on three-pointers. Davis averaged 24.7 points, 12.6 rebounds and 2.3 blocks per contest and was understandably frustrated to be snubbed as a Defensive Player of the Year finalist.

To win their 18th NBA title, the Lakers need their best players to stay healthy and play like All-Stars. That’s exactly what LA got, and all that resulted was the seventh seed in the Western Conference and a first-round series in which it routinely unraveled against the defending champion Denver Nuggets.

Say what you will about Ham, but there’s only so much a coach can do to plan for Austin Reaves and D’Angelo Russell to be his third and fourth best players in a postseason series against a genuine competitor.

Perhaps a younger version of James could take this list further. He probably had worse supporting casts during his first run with the Cleveland Cavaliers. But he’s not that guy anymore. His game gradually declined.

Looking forward, the worry for the Lakers is that they have no guarantee that James can remain this productive move into his age-40 season, or that LeBron and AD will combine to miss just 17 games. If either regress in any way, this franchise is headed for serious trouble next year.

Pelinka will inevitably do something to transform the player’s personnel, but whatever path he chooses will involve a lot of risk.

ESPN’s Dave McMenamin reported in January that Los Angeles was already discussing blockbuster moves for a big star, with the Cleveland Cavaliers’ Donovan Mitchell and the Atlanta Hawks’ Trae Young cited as examples.

Beyond mortgaging what’s left of the team’s draft capital, this type of deal would likely require giving up Reaves or other slightly lower-quality reserves. Building an even heavier team around James and Davis has already backfired once, and that was before the new collective bargaining agreement made it difficult to execute the superteam plan.

Going in a different direction and trying to consolidate around margins would allow Pelinka to use its trading assets to address more concerns. But it looks like we’ve also been watching this strategy play out already before the 2023 trade deadline. Pelinka’s move helped propel the Lakers to the Western Conference Finals, where they were still second to the Nuggets.

Hiring a new coach was Pelinka’s first order of business to open the offseason. It won’t be his most important.