Lakers New Coach JJ Redick Done Podcasting, Didn’t Speak With LeBron James

The Los Angeles Lakers formally introduced JJ Redick as their next head coach on Monday.

Redick, who retired from the NBA in 2021, spoke with the media, where he shared his plans for these Lakers as a coach without any experience.

Part of the decision to step onto the sideline required him to hang up the podcast equipment. While this seems like an easy decision to make for an NBA head coach, Redick really was a trailblazer in the way that sports media is consumed.

In 2016, Redick started hosting “The Vertical,” a basketball show on Yahoo! Sports. His show moved to Uninterrupted and The Ringer before Redick launched his own media company, ThreeFourTwo Productions, in 2020.

“The Old Man and the Three” debuted in the NBA’s bubble and has been a staple in the basketball world ever since.

More recently, in March, Redick launched the “Mind the Game” podcast with Lakers star LeBron James, where they’d deep dive into the X’s and O’s surrounding the game of basketball. The podcast was a smash hit, earning over 650,000 subscribers on YouTube in just two short months.

But the show only lasted nine episodes, as Redick said he’s done with podcasting and media to focus on coaching.

“For the time being, and hopefully it’s a very, very long time, I am excommunicated from the content space,” Redick said. “There will be no podcasts.”

Probably the right call, but a smidge disappointing for those of us who love juicy in-season content and drama. So that’s that. One of the rising stars in basketball media is done before he even really got started. 

Some critics didn’t appreciate Redick’s on-air snarkiness, but his basketball acumen is completely unmatched. Listening to the show breakdown film undoubtedly made their audience smarter basketball fans, and that’s what Redick and James set out to achieve.

But Redick claims that he did not speak with James about this Lakers job until Thursday, 30 minutes after he was offered the position.

“He didn’t provide any advice,” Redick said. “LeBron and I did not talk about the Lakers job until Thursday afternoon.”

Redick elaborated that he understands that James did not want to be involved in the search. Makes sense. James has a player option, and he will likely opt out of his current deal. He did not want to be blamed for hiring Redick and potentially skipping town. Or hiring Redick, and this fails.

But Redick said that he intentionally did not want to discuss the position with his friend because he did not want to “go down the path of hypotheticals.”

Why not? Don’t friends literally do that all the time? If you had an interview for a huge, life-changing position, wouldn’t you tell your friends about the possibility, especially if it was at a company that your friend was directly involved in?

So that did not make sense. People don’t believe it. We’ll see how things with James play out this offseason.

But one thing is certain: if James does stay with the Lakers, it’ll be a little bit disappointing that he won’t have a podcast with his head coach. That could’ve given us some darn good content.