JJ Redick may have spent 15 years as an NBA sharpshooter, but he rose to prominence off of the floor as a podcaster. He has interviewed several important figures around the NBA on The Old Man and the Three, and starting in March, he began hosting a show with Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James called Mind the Game. On Monday, though, he was introduced in his new job: as head coach of the Lakers, and the whole basketball world wanted to know if he would also be keeping his old one.
His answer was swift and decisive at his introductory press conference: so long as Redick remains the head coach of the Lakers, he will not be a podcaster. "I am, for the time being, and hopefully it's a very, very long time, I am excommunicated from the content space," Redick said. "There will be no podcast." He concluded, emphatically, "I am done with podcasting for now."
Obviously, this answer is not a surprise. No active NBA head coach has ever hosted a podcast during the season, and the demands of the job made it unlikely that Redick would try to be the first. Of course, Redick's untraditional background as a coaching candidate might have made him the ideal person to break that trend, especially since he was the first active NBA player to build a popular podcast.
But the jobs are entirely different. Players tend to have more downtime, especially on the road and during travel. Coaching is a 24-hour profession, and even if it wasn't, the Lakers obviously wouldn't want their coach sharing club secrets in a public forum. NBA head coaches occasionally appear on podcasts hosted by members of the media, but it probably isn't feasible for them to host one with any consistency themselves.
Fortunately for fans of Redick's podcasting work, he did say that there would be some sort of goodbye once the offseason slows down for the Lakers. "We'll do something when I have a breather from what we have coming up. I'm gonna be drinking out of a firehouse for the next month, but at some point, we'll just do something for all of the people that listened and we'll have a small little video." Perhaps some day, Redick will re-enter the podcasting space permanently. For now, though, he is focused fully on his first head-coaching job.
