The Los Angeles Lakers are heading into a Round 2 series against the Oklahoma City Thunder as a top-four seed in the West, but the moment the season actually turned was not in March or April. It was on the night of December 26, 2025, in a postgame interview room after a home loss to the Houston Rockets that ended with head coach JJ Redick pulling no punches.
Redick is normally measured. That night, he was furious — and explicit about why.
"The two words of the day were effort and execution," Redick said. "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. And that started legitimately right away."
He did not stop there. Asked how he was feeling about the early-game collapse, Redick brushed the question aside.
"It doesn't matter how I feel. It doesn't matter how I feel."
Then came the line that has, in retrospect, defined the year. Redick framed the loss as a culture problem rather than a tactical one, and he made clear he was prepared to break the team's routine to address it.
"Because we don't care enough right now. And that's the part that bothers you a lot. We don't care enough to do the things that are necessary. We don't care enough to be a professional," Redick said. "Saturday's practice — I told the guys it's going to be uncomfortable. The meeting is going to be uncomfortable. I'm not doing another 53 games like this."
The promise of an uncomfortable practice and an uncomfortable meeting was unusual to share publicly. So was the diagnosis underneath it. Redick refused to pretend the team simply needed more reps.
"Oh, we practice them all the time. It's not — again, it goes back to what I said the other night. It's a matter of making the choice, and too often we have guys that don't want to make that choice, and it's pretty consistent who those guys are," Redick said.
He also addressed Austin Reaves' early exit, ruling himself out of the call.
"It was not my decision but Austin clearly felt something. So we did our normal halftime and then as we were walking out of the locker room, Dr. Sims told me he was out," Redick said.
Reaves was diagnosed with a calf injury — but the larger issue, Redick suggested, was an effort gap that had nothing to do with health. The first-year head coach went on to question whether his roster genuinely understood what winning required, separating saying-it from doing-it.
"Guys will say they want to win. The care factor to me is, do I care enough to actually do what I'm supposed to do? And that's really what the championship habits are. And that's what we don't have right now," Redick said.
Asked how he intended to fix it across a roster pulling in different directions, Redick admitted he did not have a clean answer.
"Every group is different and the circumstances of trying to get out of it are different. I wish I had a good answer. It's hard, because each individual guy is at a different space. You're trying to get all of the individuals to function as a team," Redick said.
The Lakers heard the message. Five months on, they enter the second round of the playoffs as one of the league's most-improved defensive teams, with an analyst class — including Lakers great James Worthy — repeatedly pointing back to Redick's December honesty as the moment a comfortable group decided to be uncomfortable. The 53 games Redick warned he would not coach again became 53 games of a different team.
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*Originally published on [NBA News Global](https://nbanews.global/article/jj-redick-lakers-december-53-games-uncomfortable-championship-habits-2025). Visit for full coverage.*