JJ Redick and Rob Pelinka sat in the nearly identical places on the team’s practice court as they did last June when Redick was introduced as the Lakers' head coach. In the time since that decision last June, a lot has changed for the Lakers.

Pelinka earned a contract extension and an elevated front-office title after trading for Luka Doncic. Redick went from coaching unknown to a successful culture builder, even if his boldest strategies in the playoffs didn’t keep the Lakers from being eliminated after just five games for the second straight year.

“Every year we embark training camp, the journey of a season, with the goal of putting another banner up, and any season we don’t do that, we’ve fallen short of our ultimate goal here,” Pelinka said as he began Thursday’s news conference. “That said, this season was full of some exciting things that we really need to lean into for our future. One is the coach sitting next to me. JJ brought just a complete revival of energy and incredibly hard work ethic, attention to detail, a spirit to our team, to our group, to our franchise as a rookie coach that we haven’t seen in a long time.

“Our level of confidence, my level of confidence couldn’t be higher.”

Still, Thursday wasn’t about celebrating any of that — at least not on the surface. The rawest and most prevalent emotions were still tied to the Lakers’ losing 4-1 to Minnesota in a best-of-seven series in which were beaten by “the better team,” Redick said.

“Coming into the building today, sort of an eerie, familiar feeling,” Redick said. “I’ve always felt like a team is a living organism. And that season, you’ve got to feed the organism, and you hope that it’s healthy. Certainly, every organism has some chronic issues, and you try to address those. Then when you come in after the season, it feels like a funeral.

Read more:Plaschke: Lakers' season ends in humiliation … and hope

“It feels like the death of that organism.”

Exit interviews, which were conducted with players Wednesday night and with Redick and Pelinka on Thursday, give a sense of the initial autopsy — with hints and promises of what the future should hold.

Here are the biggest takeaways from Redick's and Pelinka’s comments on Friday:

The roster

Pelinka addressed the elephant in the room — the lack of a giraffe on the court.

“I'll say in general, it's very clear and it was clear then, and we spoke to it that this team and this roster needs more size and needs a center position,” he said. “That's a very clear and obvious byproduct of trading potentially the best big in the league to Dallas to get a point guard. Of course, that's going to open up a huge hole. And as I said before, the trade deadline and the moments up to it don't allow you the requisite time to explore every single unturned stone to add a big to our roster. We just didn't have the time after the Luka trade. But now we do.”

So what kind of center?

“I think in terms of center traits, it would be great to have a center that was a vertical threat, lob threat, and someone that could protect the interior defensively. I think those would be keys,” Pelinka said. “But there's multiple different types of centers that can be very effective in the league. There's also spread centers that can protect the rim. We'll look at those as well. So I wouldn't want to limit the archetype, but we know we need a big man.”

Pelinka also said he believes in the Lakers’ core.

“The level of confidence in Austin Reaves, LeBron James and Luka Doncic is at an all-time high still. So no change in how we feel about those three guys,” Pelinka said. “And in terms of assessing it, we lost the series, so we did not accomplish what we wanted to do, which was win in this series. But in every series, to me, it's like a game of chess. You learn and then when you get to play the game the next time, you're better. But I think those three guys have incredible promise playing together.

“And we will collectively do a better job to make sure they're surrounded with the right pieces to have ultimate success. And we talked at the beginning what ultimate success is here. And we're going to put in the work to allow that group of guys to win a championship.”

LeBron James and his role as the Lakers build the roster

“LeBron is a GOAT, one of the GOATs of the game. And he’s been a completely selfless leader. And I think we saw that in this playoff series, moving to playing more off the ball and committing more to the defensive end,” Pelinka said. “I think it’s just a testament to his championship DNA and character. And I think LeBron’s going to have high expectations for the roster. And we’re going to do everything we can to meet those. But I also know that whatever it is, he’s still going to give his 110% every night, whether that’s scoring, assisting, defending, rebounding, leading. We know that’s always going to be 100%, and that never wavers.”

On what needs to improve

The most direct criticism of the team came from Redick, who said he believed the Lakers needed to be in better condition to compete for a title.

“I think I'll start with the offseason and the work that's required in an offseason to be in championship shape. And we have a ways to go as a roster,” Redick said. “And certainly, there are individuals that were in phenomenal shape. There's certainly other ones that could have been in better shape. That's where my mind goes immediately is we have to get in championship shape.”

The spotlight on decisions as Lakers head coach

“We all know what the Lakers is," Redick said. "I talked about it when I did my opening press conference, I know what I signed up for and I know there's a lot of blame that gets placed on me and I'm willing to accept that. Believe me, no one's harder on me than me. In terms of our players, I think they handled it well all season. And we certainly had ups, and we certainly had downs, and we were able to weather that as a group. I think it's hard sometimes to admit this and maybe this is hard sometimes for a coach or a player to admit this. We lost to a better team. That's just the reality. We did. And we put ourselves in a position to win Games 3, 4 and 5 and we weren't able to do that in the fourth quarter.

“And that's where I think you really have to evaluate and really try to grow from as a coach and certainly as a group, whatever that group looks like next year. Minnesota is a great basketball team. They really are.”

On coaching Luka Doncic

“I think our first conversation when he flew into L.A. that night, he wants to be coached. He wants to be held accountable,” Redick said. “And I think he's expressed to me and what I've expressed to him is very similar. I want to bring out the best version of Luka. And that's what he wants from me. And so that's the partnership going forward. That's the expectation. And that's the baseline of what we're trying to do. Let's try to bring out the best version of Luka and hopefully win a championship doing that.”

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Pistons star Beasley boldly claims he's ‘best shooter in the world' originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area

Pistons guard Malik Beasley made a bold claim about his shooting abilities after the New York Knicks eliminated Detroit in Game 6 of their first-round Eastern Conference playoff series on Thursday night.

“It’s been us against the world, our team,” Beasley told reporters at Little Caesars Arena after his team’s 116-113 loss. (h/t NBACentral). “… Obviously the pain hurts. [Ausar Thompson] was pissed. He is the best defender in the world. He feels like he should have got a stop on that last possession.

“I’m the best shooter in the world. I feel like I should have got it on the last possession.”

"It's been us against the world, our team. Ausar was pissed. He is the best defender in the world. I'm the best shooter in the world"

– Malik Beasley

(h/t @ohnohedidnt24 )

pic.twitter.com/JI8UjnWfUX

— NBACentral (@TheDunkCentral) May 2, 2025

The Pistons had one more chance late in the fourth quarter to send the elimination game into overtime after Knicks star Jalen Brunson hit a go-ahead 3-pointer over Thompson for a 116-113 lead. But on the next play, a pass from Cade Cunningham to Beasley went through his hands and out of bounds, and Detroit’s season was over.

While Beasley is an accomplished shooter, averaging 16.3 points per game on 43-percent shooting from the field and 41.6 percent from deep this season, Dub Nation certainly would argue that title still belongs to Warriors star Steph Curry.

At 37 years of age, Curry remains one of the game’s most lethal shooters, posting a 44.8 shooting percentage from the field during the 2024-25 NBA season and still finishing third in threes per game (3.8) during his 16th campaign.

Not to mention Curry owns the NBA’s single-season (402) and all-time (4,058) 3-point records, and he doesn’t just kill his opponents from deep, sniping from mid-range, floaters, and everywhere else on the court. He also further etched his name into basketball shooting lore last summer with his “Golden Dagger” in the 2024 Paris Olympics, which sent Team USA home with a gold medal on the world’s biggest stage.

In short, Curry’s list of shooting accomplishments could go on and on.

It’s hard to argue that any one player is the “best” at anything in the NBA, let alone the world, and everything is subjective. But in this case, the consensus tends to lie in Curry’s favor.

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What Dray told Kerr before coach pulled Warriors starters in Game 5 originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area

As the Warriors, trailing the Houston Rockets 76-49, walked off the floor at halftime during Game 5 on Wednesday at Toyota Center, coach Steve Kerr posed a question to veteran forward Draymond Green.

“You can feel that it’s a game that is highly unlikely to go our way,” Kerr told 95.7 The Game’s “Willard and Dibs” the day after Golden State’s eventual 131-116 loss. “And Draymond and I know each other so well, I didn’t even have to express the question explicitly. All I said to him was, ‘What do you think?’ And he knew exactly what I meant.

“And he said, ‘5 minutes.’ And I said, ‘I think that makes sense, too.’ “

That’s exactly how long Kerr waited in the third quarter before pulling his starting five of Green, Steph Curry, Jimmy Butler, Brandin Podziemski and Buddy Hield off the court, replacing them with reserves Pat Spencer, Gui Santos, Quinten Post, Moses Moody and Kevin Knox II.

By then, the bench still faced a 29-point deficit.

“[Warriors assistant coach] Terry Stotts and I had talked about [pulling the starters] even before halftime started,” Kerr continued. “We debated, do we send them out at all [for the second half], and we agreed it didn’t make sense to pull them out at that point altogether. Let’s give them a chance to make a little push, but we’re not messing around because Game 6 is 48 hours later, and at that point it becomes risk [versus] reward.

“The obvious choice was to get them off the floor.”

Kerr wrestled with the decision to give his starting five a chance to make things interesting against the Rockets, and Green clearly knew that if something special didn’t happen within the first five minutes of the second half, all bets were off. But it actually was the Warriors’ bench that pulled within 11 points of the Rockets at one point in the fourth quarter.

Golden State’s reserve surge forced Houston coach Ime Udoka to put his own starters back in the game with 7:59 remaining, cutting their rest for Game 6 short while the Warriors’ mainstays remained on the bench.

“I thought that was important,” Kerr said of the Warriors’ bench bringing the Rockets’ starting five back into the game. “And to play with that kind of aggression and to force some turnovers and to make them uncomfortable, because the first 30 minutes of that game were entirely too comfortable for Houston. So I loved what our guys did in the fourth quarter.”

Kerr said it was “highly unlikely” that the Warriors’ starters would re-enter the game, because their minds already had turned the page to Game 6 and what they must do to close the first-round NBA playoff series out on Friday at Chase Center.

“My experience has always been, you let the bench ride it out and see if they can get it done.”

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JJ Redick was about to coach his first game in the NBA, a step into a new life that he was sure he wanted for himself. He was no longer the hotshot Duke star, the aimless former lottery pick, the reliable NBA starter, the trusted vet or famous podcaster.

This was something different.

“You know, I think whatever I envisioned in my previous life, that's gone,” Redick said. “This is who I am now. I'm a coach.”

Read more:Plaschke: Lakers' season ends in humiliation … and hope

And as the Lakers coach, he wanted to make one thing more than any other clear. Results would be secondary. Development would be first. A shooter can’t control whether or not an open jumper goes in; they only can control the amount of work they’ve put into giving that shot the best possible chance to go in.

And after his first NBA win, Redick reinforced that idea.

“They’re bought into the fact that this is a process and we’re not going to compete for a championship right now,” Redick said opening night. “We have buy-in from our players, we have buy-in from our coaching staff. That’s all we want right now.”

The Lakers did buy in, even when the season came to a pause due to a historic natural disaster, even when the main characters changed due to a historic superstar swap. They witnessed history when their leader fulfilled a dream to play with his son, they reshaped their culture with one trade and pulled the emergency brake to get out of another. A homegrown star rose; the NBA’s all-time leading scorer moved one step closer to his last basket.

All through it, the big wins, the crushing losses, the high-end drama and the 48 minutes of mundane, the Lakers followed Redick's lead.

But they didn’t compete for a championship — not at this step in their process. Their season ended, losing to the Minnesota Timberwolves in the first round of the playoffs, 15 wins away from the championship they hoped to claim.

And, as soon as the mourning ends, the work erecting the bridge from one win to 16 of them can begin.

For the first time since the Lakers last ended their season as champions, the building process won’t be centered on LeBron James. They’ll have a summer to put the right pieces around a new focal point in Luka Doncic, the 26-year-old future of the franchise.

That search is expected to start in the middle, where the Lakers will look to add a center to pair with one of the NBA’s top passers. The Lakers already tipped their hand on this midseason when they followed up the Doncic deal by agreeing to trade a first-round pick and Dalton Knecht to Charlotte for Mark Williams.

But the Lakers didn’t pass Williams’ physical with the team, people with knowledge of the decision but not authorized to speak publicly pointing to knee and lower leg concerns as the reasons. Some people around the NBA simply wondered if the Lakers got cold feet. Others questioned the fit in the first place.

Regardless, the Lakers are expected to go on the hunt to upgrade the position, and again, will have their 2031 first-round pick and Knecht as the carrots to try and land one. A name like Brooklyn center Nicolas Claxton will certainly be linked to the Lakers.

Read more:LeBron James' future: What's next for the Lakers star?

Dorian Finney-Smith, about to be 32, has become a favorite in the locker room. He has a player option for $15.3 million and could be looking for his last significant long-term deal.

Doncic and the Lakers will likely have extension conversations with him being eligible for one in August. Austin Reaves is also eligible for an extension that could be worth up to $90 million over four years, but Reaves is expected to garner significant interest for much more money when he can become an unrestricted free agent in 2026.

And there’s James, who can opt out of the last year of his contract to restructure his deal. And, obviously, at this stage of his career, retirement gets closer with every day, with only James knowing for sure where that road ends.

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Holiday's latest win: Celtics guard wins NBA Sportsmanship Award originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston

Jrue Holiday’s trophy case keeps growing.

The Boston Celtics guard has won the 2024-25 NBA Sportsmanship Award, the league announced Thursday. The award, first introduced during the 1995-96 season, honors the NBA player who “best represents the ideals of sportsmanship on the court.”

Boston Celtics guard Jrue Holiday is the recipient of the Joe Dumars Trophy for winning the 2024-25 NBA Sportsmanship Award.

This is the second NBA Sportsmanship Award for Holiday, who also earned the honor in the 2020-21 season with the Milwaukee Bucks. pic.twitter.com/bWmbr6LH5U

— NBA Communications (@NBAPR) May 1, 2025

This is the second NBA Sportsmanship Award for Holiday, who earned the honor with the Milwaukee Bucks in 2021. Holiday is the first Celtics player to receive the award and is just the fifth player to win the award multiple times, joining Mike Conley, Grant Hill, Jason Kidd and former Celtic Kemba Walker.

Holiday also has won the Twyman-Stokes Teammate of the Year Award three times in his career (2020, 2022 and 2024) and is finalist for the 2024-25 NBA Social Justice Champion Award. The 16-year veteran has won two NBA championships (2021 with the Bucks and 2024 with the Celtics) in addition to a pair of gold medals with Team USA in 2020 and 2024.

The last time Holiday won the league’s Sportsmanship Award, his team won an NBA championship, so he and the Celtics will be looking to continue that trend as they await their second-round opponent in the NBA playoffs.

Dorian Finney-Smith slams his hand in frustration against an empty chair on his way to the shower. The locker room is so silent you could hear a pin drop. In spite of every expert prediction, it was not “Lakers in five,” or, at least, not on the right end of five. The LeBron James, Luka Dončić, and JJ Redick-led Lakers were sent packing by the Minnesota Timberwolves on their home court in Los Angeles on Wednesday, in a five-game series whose final tally doesn’t tell the whole story.

Minnesota were decidedly the better team in the series, but with the exception of a decisive Timberwolves win in the opener, it was a sequence of games won on the margins. The final game between the two teams felt, for the most part, like a competition where neither opponent particularly felt like giving their all, which played into Minnesota’s hands as the roster with far more depth and, thus, margin for error. But, in all likelihood, the series was won and lost in Game 4, a classic, hard-fought battle that came down to the final buzzer. While it wasn’t technically the end of the series, it’s the kind of loss that’s almost impossible to come back from, both emotionally, and historically: teams who go up three games to one in a seven-game series go on to win 95% of the time.

Related: NBA playoffs: Haliburton’s ‘disrespectful’ father sparks fracas as Pacers seal Bucks’ fate

Those margins were, in large part, decided by the glaring holes in the Lakers’ roster construction that were illuminated in fluorescent light by the Timberwolves’ massive frontcourt. In short (as it were): the Lakers are not big enough, they were demolished on the boards by a Minnesota team who have size in spades. The small-ball-by-necessity style that secured the Lakers the three seed in a stacked West proved to be not quite resilient enough for a postseason that’s determined by depth and matchups more than ever. Los Angeles learned the hard way that a roster without a center making more than the league minimum can only take you so far, even on a team with the high-end talent of Dončić and James.

There was also, of course, the head coach factor. JJ Redick was damned impressive through 82 games and showed plenty of promise in his first season coaching basketball above the youth level, especially considering all the roster upheaval and, it’s worth noting, the fact that he lost his home in the Pacific Palisades fire in January. But the playoffs are a different animal, and Timberwolves head coach Chris Finch looked every bit the veteran opposite Redick, a contrast that was notable on multiple occasions throughout the series.

Perhaps the clearest example of Redick’s learning curve, and undoubtedly the one that will keep him awake at night this summer, was his decision to ride with his most successful five-man lineup of James, Dončić, Finney-Smith, Austin Reaves and Rui Hachimura for all 24 minutes of the second half of Game 4 – the first time any NBA head coach has done so in the playoffs in the tracking era. While not having much faith in his bench, which proved to be even thinner than many thought heading into the playoffs, resulted in an understandable gamble, it did not pay off: the quintet clearly had run out of gas by crunchtime, scoring only 19 points combined in the fourth quarter. That fatigue very well may have contributed to the Game 4 loss that effectively cost the Lakers the series.

Clear coaching growing pains and glaring roster deficiencies aside, it’s ultimately extremely rare for a dramatic roster move like swapping Anthony Davis (who, ironically, would have come in extremely handy for the Lakers in this series) for Dončić midseason, to pay dividends in its first year. James said as much in his exit interview on Wednesday night: “Anytime you make a big acquisition in the middle of the season, it’s always going to be challenging,” he said. “Not only for me, but for [Austin Reaves] and the rest of the group.”

James added that all things considered, the group came together well, and that there’s reason for optimism moving forward: “For the time we had, I thought we ended the regular season very well, to be top three in the West, and obviously, how tough the West is. I thought that was a good test for us. We had some challenges, but I think ultimately having a guy like [Dončić] is very dynamic for any franchise.”

The “Nico Harrison is somewhere smiling” memes were aplenty after a less-than-stellar (by his standards, at least) showing for Dončić, in his first postseason as a Laker, but it’s far too early to call the Dončić/James experiment a bust. There is, clearly, plenty of work to be done on both the supporting cast and Dončić’s conditioning (and defensive intensity, which was lackluster to say the least) in the offseason. And there is, of course, the question of 40-year-old James’s future: if he’ll even return to play another NBA season, let alone with the Lakers, is still up in the air.

But assuming James does come back for at least one more campaign in LA, there is plenty of cause for optimism as to what a full offseason and training camp, a head coach with a full season of experience under his belt, and a retooled roster could do for the pairing of two of the brightest basketball minds the world has ever seen. While the Lakers’ first round-exit is undoubtedly disappointing given all the hype and expectations around them heading into April, there is still plenty of meat left on the bone.