Los Angeles Lakers head coach JJ Redick was not in a charitable mood after the team’s 119-96 loss to the Houston Rockets on Christmas Day.
The team took its third straight loss Thursday in a one-sided affair, an outcome made worse by rising star Austin Reaves exiting the game with another calf injury. The Rockets led by double-digits for the entire second half and outrebounded the Lakers 48-25.
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After the game, Redick railed against his team’s effort level and bluntly assessed how it performed:
“The two words of the day were ‘effort’ and ‘execution.’ I feel like when we’ve done both of those things at a high level, we’ve been a good basketball team. When we haven’t, we’re a terrible basketball team. And tonight, we were a terrible basketball team.”
He went on to note the team’s next practice Saturday will not be a fun one for certain players, whose consistency he is directly questioning:
“We don’t care enough right now. That’s the part that bothers me a lot. We don’t care enough to do the things that are necessary. We don’t care enough to be professional.
It’s a matter of making the choice, and too often we have guys that don’t want to make that choice. It’s pretty consistent who those guys are. Saturday’s practice, I told the guys, it’s going to be uncomfortable. Meeting is going to be uncomfortable. I’m not doing another 53 games like this.”
That choice calls back to what Redick said after the Lakers’ previous loss to the Phoenix Suns, in which he painted the team’s defensive effort as a series of choices it wasn’t making correctly.
JJ Redick is not a happy man these days. (Photo by Mike Christy/Getty Images)
(Mike Christy via Getty Images)
His full postgame conference Thursday:
The Lakers have spent nearly the entire season on solid footing despite LeBron James’ early season absence, but now sit at 19-10, good for only fifth place in the Western Conference. The team can only hope Reaves isn’t further injured after missing three games last week with a calf strain, but it has other problems to figure out now.
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The Lakers’ next chance to get back on track will be a Sunday home game against the Sacramento Kings, who currently hold the worst record in the West at 7-23.