The internet helped JJ Redick become Lakers coach. Now he's unplugged

Lakers coach JJ Redick, right, breaks into a smile as he listens to general manager Rob Pelinka address the media.

Staff Writer

Sept. 30, 2024 3 AM PT

The place where JJ Redick wants to be, the basketball court, offers structure. The lines that mark the perimeter of the court differentiate between in bounds and out of bounds. The rules of the game make sure that craft is rewarded.

That place, the court, made Redick a star — the all-time leading scorer in Duke basketball history. It made him rich — nearly $118 million in salary earned from the Orlando Magic, Milwaukee Bucks, Clippers, Philadelphia 76ers, New Orleans Pelicans and Dallas Mavericks.

But that place didn’t lead Redick to the bench with the Lakers, at least not solely. The actual road that led Redick to the Lakers has been lined with coaxial cables, modems and Wi-Fi signals, and is painfully and, at times, beautifully structureless.

When the Lakers hired Redick as the 29th head coach in team history this spring, they got more than a former college star, more than a lottery pick who had to carve out a role as one of the league’s top shooters before becoming a valued veteran leader. They signed up for a partnership with a pioneer of basketball’s alternate realities of the internet.

But now, JJ Redick is ready to unplug.

“You will not see me tweet or post anything on IG,” Redick told The Times.

He will no longer host any of the podcasts with his ThreeFourTwo Productions. He will not continue his basketball-strategy show, “Mind the Game,” with LeBron James. He will not interact with his 328,700-some-odd followers on X or post content for his 366,000 followers on Instagram.

He hasn’t posted on either since June.

“I think there are many benefits for social media and Twitter. The bandwidth that I have where I have to be … you have to understand this too, and I’ve talked with a number of my close friends who are head coaches, my bandwidth when you have the kids, there has to be an intentionality about your time when you’re at home. And my time at the office,” Redick said two weeks before his first training camp as a head coach. “We talked as a staff this weekend about efficiency. Everything I do has to be efficient. Spending time on Twitter is not an efficient use of my time as a head coach.”

To be clear, Redick isn’t going totally underground. He’s quit social media before and found the experience to be freeing, returning to the space only as he transitioned from NBA player to professional broadcaster and commentator.

“It’s a dark place,” Redick said of social media to Bleacher Report in 2018. “It’s not a healthy place. It’s not real. It’s not a healthy place for ego … if we’re talking about some Freudian s—. It’s just this cycle of anger and validation and tribalism. It’s scary, man.”

Now, ahead of his first year as the Lakers coach, which officially opens Monday with the team’s media day, Redick is steadfast in again leaving that dark place — at least as a participant.

“I took a two-year break and it was great,” he said. “But you have to understand, for me and what I was doing with the podcast and with ESPN, I had to have a social media account and I had to follow … I’m a weeds person. I wanted to know all of the discourse. If I’m going to be commentating on the discourse on ‘First Take’ or if I’m going to be commentating on the discourse on my podcast, I want to know what the discourse was.”

Lakers coach JJ Redick sits courtside during Summer League game in Las Vegas.

To be clear, there was more to it than that. Redick would clarify and defend positions, sometimes to former NBA players like Eddie Johnson, who like Redick, was working in media. And sometimes, he’d get into a back-and-forth discussion with unknown figures like @TheDressedLlama.

“Some of it can be fun if it’s a bit,” he acknowledged.

Redick can brush off his upcoming social media absence, but there’s no denying the role his presence online played in his post-playing days, the one that’s now got him coaching James and the Lakers.

In 2016, he became the first NBA player to host a weekly podcast in season when he agreed to join Yahoo Sports and Adrian Wojnarowski’s “The Vertical.” A year later, he went to Bill Simmons’ site, The Ringer, where he launched a podcast that booked guests from Joel Embiid to James Corden to Kyrie Irving to Thierry Henry in the first batch of shows.

He left to start his own production company and a new podcast, “The Old Man and the Three” (a Hemingway pun), in 2020 and amassed more than 1 million subscribers.

Jason Gallagher, a producer who worked with Redick at The Ringer and left for a role at “The Old Man and the Three,” said he saw first-hand that any preconceived notions he might have had about Redick — the sorta 1980s movie bad guy persona he carved out for himself as a star at Duke — were quickly erased.

“He’s been in a lot of sports fans lives like for, for years and years and years. And so you have a preconceived notion of him … like, there’s no way me and this guy are going to ever vibe like, you know what I mean? … And, I was just very quickly surprised by how open and kind and normal he can kind of be.”

Redick impressed Gallagher with how much he trusted the producer when it came to ideas for the show and with how much work he put in to making sure all the granular details were as good as they could be.

“I’m not kidding. He would call me random-ass nights when I’m laying in bed with my wife watching ‘Shark Tank,’ and he’s just like calling me to talk to me about like Memphis’ whatever, like what they’re doing on offense, and I’m like, ‘Know your audience, bro.’”

The obsession and the humanity came through in his work, when Redick somehow walked a line where he was supremely confident in his opinions and experiences while also being wildly curious enough to interact with fairly anonymous “footwork gurus” who run social media accounts dissecting what is and isn’t a travel.

“It’s his commitment to basketball,” Gallagher said. “It’s really a fascinating thing to me. It really genuinely is. And that’s why I think he is gonna be great. Like he doesn’t just love the game He doesn’t just love like all of the stuff that comes with being the Lakers coach, this sort of fame, the notoriety, whatever. Like I actually believe he has a kinship to the sport of basketball that is so pure. That’s why I have so much faith in him in this new endeavor.”

When the Lakers introduced Redick as their coach this summer, the team didn’t specifically say anything about how he won them over with his tweets or YouTube videos. But the noise he made in the space certainly made him a unique candidate, offering examples of his philosophies in lieu of any actual on-court work the team could judge.

“When we set out on the journey to name the next Lakers coach, we really had in mind concepts around innovation and challenging ourselves to be forward thinking,” general manager Rob Pelinka said. “I think in industry in general and in sports in specific, sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in patterns of being in a sea of same, a sea of sameness and doing the same thing that everybody else is doing. But when we embarked on this search, it was really important for us to see if we could do something a little bit different.”

And someone who podcasted and posted his way into a job, Redick’s path has certainly a little bit different.

As he stands on the edges of the first days of his new career, one he’s hellbent on conquering, he’s moving with as clear of a mind as possible. He works with multiple mental coaches, including a performance coach and a mindset coach.

This summer, when he suddenly found himself thrust back to the foreground of news cycles for the first time since he was the brash scoring sensation in the ACC, Redick felt uneasy with a moment that was “Truman Show-y,” he said.

“This spring, post bump to the (ESPN ‘A’ broadcast) team, post LeBron podcast launching, post coaching rumors and some things that never got reported on — there was another substantial opportunity in a different organization that wasn’t coaching related — when all of that was happening, we talked through all the different pulls on my life.”

JJ Redick gestures while speaking to a broadcaster holding a microphone

And there was just no way that social media was going to be one of them.

“You think about this job and what’s required in this job, and one of the things that’s required is self-motivation, as well as the ability to motivate other people. Another thing that’s required is having a clear head,” he said. “So for me, I don’t need external motivation. I let go of that at some point at Duke. I just let go of that aspect of it and the emotional highs and lows of that. It’s nice. You get rid of that.

“The clear-minded thing is super important because it’s ultimately the people in the coaches’ room with me as we self-audit and project and look forward and look behind, whatever we’re doing with that specific day’s task, it has to come from within that room. And we have to be clear-minded versus, ‘Hey guys, Joe Smith47198 said we’re doing a bad job calling timeouts.’ I think if we’re doing a bad job of calling timeouts, we’ve probably already brought that up ourselves.”

Then Redick paused and started to laugh, almost as if he could imagine the pinging of his phone after his sideline behavior got dissected.

“There are going to be memes and GIFs [of me] for sure,” he said. “It’s inevitable.”

He just won’t be the one posting them.