NBA analyst JJ Redick may be set for a career change after interviewing for the Toronto Raptors job.
The former player, who spent 15 years in the league, was part of the first-round of candidates to meet with Raptors owners to discuss the job, ESPN reports.
After retiring from the NBA in 2021, Redick became an analyst on ESPN’s First Take alongside Stephen A. Smith and host Molly Qerim. He began preparing for his post-NBA career back in 2016 when he launched a podcast on Yahoo! Sports.
By doing this Redick became the first active NBA player and just the second active professional athlete to start hosting a podcast. Alongside his ESPN job, the former LA Clippers star hosts a podcast called "The Old Man and the Three,” which has 844,000 subscribers on YouTube.
The former shooting guard has been a target for multiple teams, including the Boston Celtics in the role of an assistant coach. The Raptors sacked coach Nick Nurse last month, a week after they were eliminated from the Play-In tournament.
They have since commenced a wide-ranging process to hire a new head coach, and have interviewed several candidates such as Golden State's Kenny Atkinson, Milwaukee's Charles Lee and Phoenix's Kevin Young. The Raptors assistant coach Adrian Griffin has also been interviewed, as has San Antonio's Mitch Johnson, Sacramento's Jordi Fernandez, Memphis' Darko Rajakovic and Las Vegas Aces coach Becky Hammon.
Social media users had their say on the news as one tweeted: “Oh wow!? THIS would be very interesting…..”, while another added: “That’s huge for JJ, hope he gets a shot.” Another user commented: “Wow, maybe he does want to coach. He'd make a great one," while another fan, who has followed Redick since his playing days at Duke College wrote: “I hope he gets it. As a lifelong Duke fan I love seeing Blue Devils succeed.”
Many have been impressed with his analysis on First Take, and some of his most recent comments focused on the reasons the Boston Celtics lost game five of their Playoff series with the Philadelphia 76ers. His former team defeated the Celtics 115-103 at the TD Garden to open up a 3-2 series lead with the chance to clinch the series in game six tonight.
Redick explained what contributed to the Celtics’ loss as they now face elimination. “The Celtics right now are not executing game plan at a high level,” Redick said. “They’re at their best, offensively, with body and ball movement. We saw too much iso.
“They’re not doing a great job of involving Jaylen Brown. He’s come out in this series, every first quarter, super aggressive. His touches have gone down.” He added: “They’ve done a good job, for the most part in this series, of forcing James Harden right in pick-and-roll. He’s a much less effective passer going right.
“Last night, in 15 pick-and-rolls where they sent him right seven times, no points. They let him get to his left hand eight times, that was 1.71 points per possession. To me, this is about the Celtics and just a lack of execution on both ends.”
