JJ Redick is the Greatest Coach Ever
A MESSAGE FROM THE FUTURE!
The following was written on June 20, 2054:
Thirty years ago today, the Los Angeles Lakers hired JJ Redick, the greatest basketball coach in the history of all basketball ever in the universe.
This was confirmed during the Great Arrival of 2047, when representatives of the Nebulous Occult Council of Alien Psychics (NOCAP) landed on Earth, announced that they’d peered into the future and saw that JJ Redick was the greatest basketball mind that ever was or will be, then got back into their spaceship and flew into the sun.
You could tell JJ Redick was the right hire from the way he handled the interview process. The way everybody else said “no, I do not want to coach the Lakers because I am not insane” was a masterstroke of JJ’s genius rivaled in its cunning only by George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware.
He was a good player, critics admitted, but he had no coaching experience whatsoever and was only hired because he was best buds with LeBron James. These fools lacked vision. They didn’t understand that being an NBA head coach is all about how good your high fives are.
Yes, Redick’s resume may have been thinner than the gums on a tobacco-chewing geriatric, but only obsessive-compulsive, look-at-me-teacher-I-did-all-the-homework types care about ridiculous things like “credentials” and “time-on-task.”
It simply wasn’t true that he had no coaching experience. He had coached a 4th-grade team, and if you can wrangle a squad of nine-year-old children, you can wrangle a squad of really tall millionaires.
Frankly, I think these people were just upset that JJ was breaking down barriers as the first podcaster to be named a basketball coach. Sure, it’s nothing out of the ordinary now, but people in the 2020s didn’t properly appreciate podcasters.
It was JJ Redick who scientifically proved that consuming podcasts makes you a genius. He did this in a Duke University-sponsored study where he strapped the entire Lakers front office to Clockwork Orange chairs and forced them to watch every single episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast. Thanks to this experiment they finally understood you needed to put more than two players on the floor at a time. It’s thanks to JJ that all you need to become a certified psychotherapist in 2054 is to listen to 10,000 hours of Marc Maron asking actors what they were like in high school.
Granted, it hasn’t been all peaches and cream for the Lakers under JJ Redick. Everyone was very sad when LeBron James had to retire at age 64 due to that devastating injury. I don’t know about you, but I can recall exactly where I was when I found out the ghost of Skip Bayless had dropped a piano on his head.
I suppose the only legitimate moment of doubt about JJ Redick came when the Lakers hired him. It almost looked like the front office and ownership had no idea what they were doing. It almost looked like they had duct taped pictures of LeBron’s Facebook friends to a Price is Right wheel, spun it several times, and shouted “hire that one!” when it landed on somebody who might know what a pick and roll is.
But luckily we don’t live in that world. We live in JJ Redick’s utopia, where cotton candy grows on trees and drunk driving is not only legal but encouraged.