JJ Redick suffered the first official loss of his head coaching career on Monday and The Athletic’s Jovan Buha stated that various Los Angeles Lakers players revealed he was quite pissed off in the locker room afterward.
“LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Austin Reaves, and Rui Hachimura all spoke to how pissed off JJ Redick was in the locker room postgame after the loss.”
You want your coach to be upset about losses, especially ones like that. The Lakers seemed in complete control against the Phoenix Suns, as they led by as many as 18 points at one stage, but weren’t able to hold on to that advantage. They eventually ended up losing 109-105 to drop to 3-1 on the season.
Redick’s frustrations were evident during his postgame press conference. He was not a happy man and here’s what Anthony Davis had to say about his head coach’s mood in the locker room.
“It’s on all of us, not just him,” Davis said about Redick taking the blame for the Lakers’ 14-point second quarter. “Obviously, he’s a coach and he’s going to try to take the blame but we scored 14 points as players. There’s things that we could have did better as a group, coaching staff, and players, but we didn’t. We’ll learn from it.
“We’ll watch film on it, how we can not have another 14-point quarter this season and learn from our mistakes,” Davis added. “But yeah, he’s pretty pissed. I mean we’re all pissed.”
Austin Reaves, meanwhile, revealed that Redick has the same mentality as him, with the two hating losing more than they like winning. They’d be keen to ensure the Lakers don’t suffer another loss when they take on the 4-0 Cleveland Cavaliers on Wednesday.
JJ Redick Spoke On Managing The Lows That Come With Being A Head Coach
Redick, of course, had no prior head coaching experience before taking over the Lakers. He hadn’t even coached at the high school level prior to this but wasn’t living under any delusions about it being an easy job. Before the start of the season, Redick spoke about managing the ups and downs that come with coaching the Lakers.
“Learning not to get too high or too low. Actually, probably not too high. That’s the challenge… Self-criticalness and low points go hand in hand. If we aren’t executing… I tend to blame myself. I trust my coaches. There’s not been any ‘Why are we doing this? You guys said you’d coach this’.”
“It’s more like ‘Am I not doing this a clear way? Because it’s not happening on the court’. That’s a low. Losing is a low. And that’s where, throughout the season, we just have to maintain as a group, all of us, that this is a process. Our goal is to get better every single game, every single week. We believe as a group, if we do that and embrace that, by the end of the regular season, we’ll be a very good team.”
Well, Redick has faced his first bit of adversity as head coach now and it’ll be interesting to see how he and his team respond against the Cavaliers. I expect them to come out strong, but it won’t be easy to beat a red-hot team like the Cavs.
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