JJ Redick

speaker

214 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 4 May

JJ Redick’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Zach Lowe Show · Playoff Drama! NBA First-Round Action Heats Up With Rob Mahoney. · 28 Apr 2025 podcast

This is a guy both of us kind of our professional careers kind of overlap almost exactly with Damian Lillard's entry from Weber State into the NBA. I remember watching him at Summer League trying to pick apart his game, not pick apart, but like, oh, my gosh, something something's interesting here.

We all know, you know, there ain't too many players with two series winning walk off shots in the history of the NBA. I mean, just reaction, just gut reaction.

It's one of the reasons what you said about regular season basketball enthusiasts. I might change my social media bio to that. It's one of the reasons that one of my favorite random NBA teams of all time is the 2018-19 Blazers, who come off an absolute humiliation sweep at the hands of Anthony Davis and Drew Holiday the year before, where Drew Holiday just single-handedly turns into like...

Michael Jordan plus Scottie Pippen for the entire series. It destroys the Blazers. Embarrass those guys, really. In a series that you could look at and say, well, okay, you're never the same after that. You got to make some trades. You got to fire some people. And the Blazers didn't. they held the fort, they rebound next year, and they make the Western Conference Finals.

This is the bye-bye year against Oklahoma City when Dame makes one of the all-time great shots, and then they beat Denver in a seven-game slugfest in the next round. And people kind of poo-poo that Conference Finals run because they got smoked by the Warriors in the Conference Finals, totally overmatched. The bracket broke right for them.

They got some health luck, although they suffered their own health injuries, the health issues. Nurkic was hurt for, I think in that entire playoff run for them and Cantor, that was like the Ennis Cantor playoffs. You know what? I've said this many times before. Ask the LA Clippers about how easy it is to make a conference finals.

Ask a bunch of these... Ask the Charlotte Hornets haven't won a playoff series in like a thousand years. Never poo-poo. Yeah, brackets break, right? You get some luck. That's fine. A lot of teams are never able to put themselves in any kind of position to take advantage of that kind of luck. I love that team. I've always loved Dame.

If you look back at my MVP ballots over the years, I always have him like a spot or two above consensus. And it just... it's he's been pretty open about how rough the transition to Milwaukee was for him personally. Yeah. I think he bought in the chemistry with Giannis just kind of never got to the point where we all thought it would be so easy for them on the pick and roll.

And we can talk about that trade and revisit it. Yeah. And I didn't think they were going to win this series with Dame, without Dame. I just didn't think they were good enough. But this is just... For NBA diehards who are up watching Blazers jazz at 11.30 Eastern time, he's a beloved player. And he's a beloved leader. And he's just... It just sucks.

Look, there are a lot of moves you can knock the bucks of the last six to seven years over. Certainly. I always go back to one of the stupid podcast things that I was happiest about in my retrospective of looking back. was squeezing in a rant about Dante DiVincenzo for Serge Ibaka at the end of whatever trade deadline podcast that was. It's like, I just don't understand.

Everybody liked that trade for the Bucs. And I was like, has anyone watched Serge Ibaka? Like, I just don't trade wing for watched a big ever, not one time. The draft picks that were missed, the Kuzma trade is obviously a disaster, which included one of the only draft picks that who knows it may end up being a hit for the Bucs, AJ Johnson. Yeah. I'm with you on the Dame trade.

I will defend it until the end. Now, you could say, did they overreact to the Miami series in which they just fell apart completely? Giannis missed most of the series. Bud did not cover himself in glory in that series. They fire Bud. Butler bullies Drew Holiday. And it feels to them like the end of the road for this team. Like, we just don't have enough offense. And they make this trade...

And they get Giannis then to sign an extension a month later, which in itself is a huge victory for that trade. Look, it hasn't worked. And one of the reasons it didn't work, as you said, is they couldn't control Drew Holiday's destination and it ended up being a worst case scenario for them. Another reason it didn't work is that Dame is 34 and got older a little faster than I think we expected.

Another reason it didn't work is that the Dame Giannis pick and roll never turned in to the Steph Draymond 2.0, except the Draymond in this is a seven foot monster who can lob dunk everything. Right. I don't know why it didn't. I suspect part of the reason why is that Giannis didn't want to set 40 screens a game, and that's fine. He's above that in that he is above that.

Another reason it didn't work is that teams just sold out on it from preseason game one. It was clear like, Brooke Lopez, you're going to be allowed to shoot. Whoever, you're going to be allowed to shoot. Another reason the trade didn't work is part of the logic, and I echoed this logic, was Yeah, you hurt your defense by trading Drew Holiday, one of the best perimeter defenders in the league.

Your base defense is a dropback scheme. That doesn't work if the guy pursuing the ball handler isn't hounding that guy from behind and challenging all those shots and making all those looks extra difficult. But who are we kidding? If you have Giannis and Brooke Lopez, you have the foundation of an elite defense for the next couple of years.

And Brooke Lopez got benched in this series against Indiana. He was too slow for the series, and that didn't hold up either. And it's tempting to look back and say, What happens if they don't make the Dame trade? Are we just in the same spot anyway, given what has happened to Chris Middleton's career? But I guess the difference would be you're in the same spot, but let's say you've stood pat.

You still have all the draft picks that you no longer have. You still have the ability to trade Drew Holiday, which you no longer have. Now... You don't have the ability to trade Damian Lillard, which was the last bullet left in the can we salvage this thing around Giannis? And nobody wants to have this conversation. I don't want to have this conversation. You don't want to have this conversation.

Definitely not. Opposing teams who I contacted last night who would theoretically be Giannis suitors already do not want to have this conversation. They're in mourning, too. It is unfortunately unavoidable just to say this. They can't trade Dame. That pivot is gone. This team cannot win with Giannis. There is no path to them winning big in the playoffs anymore.

They do not control their draft pick through 2030, so they cannot tank. And there just isn't enough here. There's no path to a championship team. And Everyone understands that the Bucs understand that Giannis surely must understand that.

Showing 21–40 of 214 · page 2 of 11