First-year head coach JJ Redick found a silver lining after his Los Angeles Lakers lost an Oct. 15 preseason game to the Golden State Warriors.
“If you look at it, for us and our group to take 40 3s in a game, that’s promising,” Redick said after the defeat, before making a somewhat ambitious proclamation. “It’s promising. We can get it up to 50, hopefully, but 40 is good.”
Obviously, 50 3s per game wasn’t a realistic target. Redick would later say that he “would like [the Lakers] to average five or six more 3s a game,” but that initial quote took on a life of its own for its combination of novelty and predictability.
If any coach would push for 50 3’s per game, wouldn’t it be the former sharpshooter-turned-analytics savvy media voice? The seemingly sarcastic target was impossible. It’s also exactly what gawking onlookers were expecting out of a coach with such an unorthodox background. Oh, look at the podcaster and his mathematical fantasies.
And that’s part of what has made Redick’s stellar start as coach of the Lakers so impressive. It’s not happening because he plucked a single piece of low-hanging fruit like shot-selection. It’s happening because he’s overhauled the ways in which the Lakers get to the looks they always wanted.
Through two games, the Lakers are only attempting 28.5 3-pointers per game. That’s nearly three fewer than they did a season ago, and the second-fewest in the NBA so far. It just hasn’t mattered because the Lakers are doing everything else perfectly. They outscored Minnesota by 32 points in the paint on Tuesday. They assisted on 33 of their 40 field goals against Phoenix on Friday. They’ve gotten to the foul line 64 times in two games.
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because this is how the best versions of the Lakers have played during the LeBron James-Anthony Davis era. Their supporting casts have never been suited to the sort shot-diets other contenders are moving towards, so when the Lakers have won, it has largely been through physicality and unselfishness. The best coaches lean into the rosters they have, not the ones they want. Redick has done so thus far, enacting changes that have made a drastic difference without compromising the team’s core identity.
No team moved less on offense last season than the Lakers, according to NBA.com tracking data. It wasn’t close, either. The gap between the Lakers and No. 29 Clippers, in terms of miles their players traveled per game, was bigger than the difference between the Clippers and the No. 21 Hawks. Now you’re seeing set plays like this:
It’s a tiny sample through two games, but the Lakers have 37 points off of cuts so far this season. That’s an average of 18.5 points per game, up from around 12 last season. After averaging 267.5 passes per game a season ago, the Lakers fired off 334 of them in the season opener. Redick has enough buy-in from his players to incorporate all of this extra movement and passing, and he’s using it to generate the shots they’re best at making.
With time, Redick will surely push the Lakers towards higher 3-point volume. That has less to do with his perceived inclinations as a coaching prospect and more to do with both the reality of the modern NBA and the ways in which defenses will adapt to what he’s done so far. Redick doesn’t just want to blindly create 3s. He wants to create good 3s, and the best way to do that is to fashion an offense in which defenses have no choice but to surrender them in order to stop everything else.
This is what great coaches do. They maximize the players they have so they can subtly shift the style of games their team plays in their preferred direction. It’s accounting for process before results and ensuring that players embrace changes over time. It’s very early, but so far Redick is doing just about everything right as a head coach and, even if he never gets the Lakers to 50 3s per game, he’s already taken a massive step in the right direction.
