First-year head teacher JJ Redick found a silver lining after the Los Angeles Lakers lost an Oct. 15 preseason game to the Blonde State Warriors.
“If you look at it, for us and our team to hit 40 3-pointers in a game, that’s promising,” Redick said before the loss, before creating a reasonably aspirational proclamation. “It’s promising. Hopefully we can get to 50, but 40 is good.”
Clearly, 50 three-pointers consistent with the sport was not a practical goal. Redick would then say that “he would like [the Lakers] “average five or six more three-pointers per game,” but that initial quote took on a date of its own for its combination of novelty and predictability.
If some professor pushed fifty-three in line with the sport, wouldn’t the former sniper turned analytics expert be the focus of the media? The seemingly sarcastic goal was once unattainable. It’s also exactly what gaping spectators expected from a teacher with such an unorthodox background. Oh, take a look at the podcaster and his math fantasies.
And that’s part of what has made Redick’s stellar start as a Lakers teacher so important. It is no longer happening because you plucked a single piece of ripe fruit as a shot pick. This happens because he has revised the tactics in which the Lakers achieve the look they always sought.
Through two games, the Lakers are only attempting 28.5 three-pointers depending on the game. That’s about three fewer than a season ago, and the second-fewest in the NBA to date. It just hasn’t mattered because the Lakers are completely doing everything else. They outscored Minnesota by 32 points in the paint on Tuesday. They assisted on 33 of their 40 rushing goals against Phoenix on Friday. They have reached the foul sequence 64 times in two games.
If any of this sounds common, it’s because this is how the most productive versions of the Lakers have performed throughout the LeBron James-Anthony Davis history. Their supporting casts have never been suited to the kind of injection diets that alternative contenders are moving against, so when the Lakers have won, it has been largely through their physicality and their selflessness. The best coaches lean towards the squads they have, not the ones they would like. Redick has done it so far, implementing changes that have gone a long way without compromising the team’s core identity.
Deny’s team moved less offensively last season than the Lakers, according to NBA.com tracking data. It wasn’t the same either. The space between the Lakers and Deny. 29 Clippers, in terms of miles their players traveled depending on the game, was greater than the extra between the Clippers and Deny. 21 falcons. Now that you are optical, everything is ready and works like this:
It’s a sequence of minutes in two games, but the Lakers have 37 points off cuts so far this season. That’s an average of 18.5 points per game, up from Round 12 last season. Then, averaging 267.5 passes per game a season ago, the Lakers made 334 of them in the season opener. Redick has a lot of acceptance from his avid players to include all these movements and differential passes, and he uses them to generate the images that he knows how to do perfectly.
Over time, Redick will undoubtedly push the Lakers against the superior number of three-pointers. That has less to do with his perceived tendencies as an anticipation of coaching and more to do with the reality of the modern NBA and the tactics in which defenses will adapt to what he has accomplished thus far. Redick doesn’t need to just blindly develop 3-pointers. He wants to develop excellent 3, and the best way to do that is to design an offense where defenses have no choice but to give up to avoid everything else.
That’s what great coaches do. They max out the players they have so they can subtly change the shape of the games their team plays in their favorite class. It’s about considering the process before the effects and ensuring that players make changes throughout the month. It’s early days, but so far Redick is doing almost everything right as head teacher, and while he’ll never get the Lakers to 50 three-pointers depending on the game, he’s already made strides constructively.
