JJ Redick Had Honest Admission About Playing Without LeBron James in Loss to Warriors

The LeBron James-less Lakers dropped the season-opener to the Warriors 119-109 on Tuesday night at Crypto.com Arena. And while coach JJ Redick largely succeeded at the task of creating a productive offense without James thanks to strong efforts from Luka Dončić and Austin Reaves, it was admittedly difficult at times for the Lakers coach to not think about what the product could look like with the future Hall of Famer on the floor.

"It's hard to forget about LeBron," Redick said after the game. "The reality is when you're focused on the group that you have, you gotta make that group work. So sometimes you can just be like, 'Oh, oh my god, we're going to get LeBron back. It's awesome.'

"I'll be honest with you, I did have one moment in that first half when we had a few possessions we couldn't score against the zone it'd be great to have Lebron just to throw it to in the high post."

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It's hard not to blame Redick for letting that thought pop into his head. The Lakers weren't bad offensively necessarily, three-point struggles aside. Los Angeles shot 54.7% from the field. But something was missing.

For over a three-minute stretch of game time in the first quarter, the Lakers failed to score a bucket, a troubling stretch that likely had Redick's mind wandering a bit towards the four-time NBA MVP with over 40,000 career points scored seated on the bench. The likes of Dončić and Reaves combined to score over 60% of the Lakers' points.

Redick told reporters he "wasn't concerned" about Dončić's heavy workload.

And despite the Lakers' loss, Redick believes much of Los Angeles's shortcomings on both sides of the ball—chemistry between players such as Dončić and Ayton, missed defensive assignments—can be attributed to "self-inflicted wounds."

"...I think it's mostly self-inflicted," Redick said. "I think if you look at this game, like a microcosm of this game was we did enough good things to put ourselves in a position to win for most of the game and when we didn't do those things, they were self-inflicted."