Did Lakers’ JJ Redick go mad scientist after Game 1 loss to Timberwolves?
LOS ANGELES — Remember the State Farm commercial from a few years ago in which a very-caffeinated and disheveled JJ Redick, who at the time was in the first season of his broadcasting career with ESPN, was in a dark room rambling about how the pick-and-roll is the Pythagorean theorem but in reverse?
Redick shed light on how the commercial came about before Game 2 of the Lakers’ first-round playoff series against the Minnesota Timberwolves on Tuesday.
“Fun story about that commercial, by the way – didn’t know that I was gonna do that,” Redick said before Game 2. “Got done with [ESPN’s] ‘NBA Today’, drove over and I was like, ‘You know what? Let me check the script.’ Read the script. Disheveled, shirt’s unbuttoned, hair’s crazy. They’re putting black eye circles under me. And then I started reading it. It’s ‘Oh, I’m a lunatic.’
“And they made me, every take, drink out of the coffee pot – which was lukewarm, by the way. I went through three full coffee pots that day. So by the end of the shoot I was just that … it was really me, I was not acting.”
The topic of the commercial that first aired in April 2022 came up because Redick was, in jest, asked if that was an accurate depiction of him in the days since the Lakers’ Game 1 blowout loss to the Timberwolves on Saturday night.
Redick didn’t answer the question directly, but he admitted that he went deep into the game film rabbit hole.
“I watched some [expletive] I shouldn’t have been watching,” he said. “I’m like diving into Utah’s offense versus Minnesota. I’m like, ‘they’re not gonna play a playoff game the same way. Why am I watching this? What am I doing?’”
PLAYING BIGGER
After starting center Jaxson Hayes played just eight minutes in the series opener, the first time he played single-digit minutes in a game as a starter since an early exit because of an injury in a Feb. 12 road loss to the Jazz.
Redick explained why that was the case, and what Hayes could do to get more playing time.
“A lot of it is how much … so [Rudy] Gobert played half of the game,” he elaborated. “And some of that was a little bit of foul trouble. Some of that was their [Naz] Reid-[Julius] Randle combination played really well.
“That’s going to be a switching lineup. It’s just the matchup. And it’s how much Gobert plays, how much do we want to play our laser [lineup] versus Gobert, how much do we want to have a lob threat versus Gobert. So that’s just the calculus of that.”
OLD FILM
The Timberwolves are familiar with Lakers star Luka Doncic after Doncic led the Dallas Mavericks past Minnesota in the Western Conference finals last season.
But the Mavericks fell to the Boston Celtics in the NBA Finals, in part because of the Celtics’ ability to switch ball screens effectively – a strategy Minnesota deployed in Saturday’s Game 1.
Timberwolves coach Chris Finch said his team looked at the film from last year’s Finals a little bit but mostly looked at the film from Doncic’s time with the Mavericks to figure out how they can have a better defensive game plan against him.
“Looking back at our film against Dallas was probably more revealing to us,” Finch said. “We let Luka control too much of what he was wanting to do and got to what he wanted to do in the series. He’s an incredible player. You’re really not going to stop him. The things that we made pick last season to live with were the wrong things and we weren’t, to the discussion earlier, disciplined enough and we kind of let him lead the dance and that’s not a good place to.”