JJ Redick and Rob Pelinka sat in the nearly identical places on the team’s practice court as they did last June when Redick was introduced as the Lakers’ head coach. In the time since that decision last June, a lot has changed for the Lakers.
Pelinka earned a contract extension and an elevated front-office title after trading for Luka Doncic. Redick went from coaching unknown to a successful culture builder, even if his boldest strategies in the playoffs didn’t keep the Lakers from being eliminated after just five games for the second straight year.
“Every year we embark training camp, the journey of a season, with the goal of putting another banner up, and any season we don’t do that, we’ve fallen short of our ultimate goal here,” Pelinka said as he began Thursday’s news conference. “That said, this season was full of some exciting things that we really need to lean into for our future. One is the coach sitting next to me. JJ brought just a complete revival of energy and incredibly hard work ethic, attention to detail, a spirit to our team, to our group, to our franchise as a rookie coach that we haven’t seen in a long time.
“Our level of confidence, my level of confidence couldn’t be higher.”
Still, Thursday wasn’t about celebrating any of that — at least not on the surface. The rawest and most prevalent emotions were still tied to the Lakers’ losing 4-1 to Minnesota in a best-of-seven series in which were beaten by “the better team,” Redick said.
“Coming into the building today, sort of an eerie, familiar feeling,” Redick said. “I’ve always felt like a team is a living organism. And that season, you’ve got to feed the organism, and you hope that it’s healthy. Certainly, every organism has some chronic issues, and you try to address those. Then when you come in after the season, it feels like a funeral.
“It feels like the death of that organism.”
Exit interviews, which were conducted with players Wednesday night and with Redick and Pelinka on Thursday, give a sense of the initial autopsy — with hints and promises of what the future should hold.
Here are the biggest takeaways from Redick‘s and Pelinka’s comments on Friday: