The Los Angeles Lakers have been a pretty good team so far this season, and they improved to 19-14 on Thursday with a 114-106 win over the Portland Trail Blazers. But many aren’t fully sold on them or J.J. Redick, their new head coach.
On TNT’s “Inside the NBA,” Charles Barkley implied that Redick will eventually get fired unless the Lakers make progress and do more than simply make the playoffs.
“I got your Lakers games,” said Barkley. “You can’t hide them flaws they got. You just a dead man walking. They got rid of Frank Vogel, who did a good job. They got rid of Darvin Ham, who did a good job. But you came out there thinking you were gonna change things with that same ugly girl you went on a date with.
“… The Lakers stink, man.”
Redick is the fourth head coach the Lakers have had since they brought in LeBron James during the summer of 2018. Luke Walton, whom they hired in 2016, was dismissed in 2019, and after Vogel coached them to the NBA championship the following season, he was fired following the 2021-22 campaign when they failed to reach the play-in tournament.
Ham, who was Vogel’s replacement, found some success by guiding L.A. to the Western Conference Finals in 2023. But after an up-and-down campaign last season, he too was shown the door.
Redick has no real prior coaching experience at either the college or pro levels, which made many skeptical that he was the right choice for Los Angeles. But so far, he has done a solid job. He kept the team in one piece when it lost eight out of 11 games a few weeks ago, and it now has seven victories in its last 10 tries.
The Lakers had major problems on the defensive end of the floor in October and November, but they have greatly improved in that department over the last few weeks. With third-year guard Max Christie playing well on both ends of the floor, Redick may have found a starting lineup that will work on the regular.
But if things go south for a prolonged period of time, one has to wonder how safe Redick’s job could be past this season. There is a perception, whether it’s true or not, that Lakers head coaches have been made into scapegoats in recent years.
