JJ Redick and Mark Daigneault brought Scott Brooks into the conversation around the Lakers-Thunder playoff series for the same reason: both said the assistant coach helped shape their careers in different ways. Redick said people around the NBA kept telling him during the 2024 offseason to hire Brooks, while Daigneault said Brooks gave him his first real access to an NBA bench when he was coaching the Oklahoma City Blue.
The timing mattered because the teams opened their second-round series Tuesday at Paycom Center, and the back-to-back nods to Brooks turned a playoff preview into something more personal. Brooks, who coached the Thunder from 2008 to 2015, is now on Redick’s Lakers staff, a role Redick said he tested the old-fashioned way after he became head coach by taking Brooks to a golf course in Los Angeles.
Daigneault said Monday that he had shown film of Redick playing defense to his players, and Redick answered before Game 1 that the exchange had made him smile. He said Daigneault had pulled him aside and mentioned a very specific series of clips he was using, one that included the former guard’s work on defense. Redick said he spent much of his career being judged by how he looked, saying he was “a duck” in his first two seasons and again in his last three, but that he was a pretty good defender in between.
He backed that up with a memory from last season’s regular season, when he showed his own players a clip of himself taking a charge on LeBron James. Redick said the play ended with James’ left elbow striking his eye, leaving him with nine stitches and a concussion. It was the kind of detail that fit the broader point of the exchange: both coaches were reaching back into their playing or coaching pasts to teach a current team.
Daigneault’s connection to Brooks goes back to the end of Brooks’ tenure in Oklahoma City, when Daigneault was running the Thunder’s G League affiliate. Daigneault said Brooks let him be around the Thunder in training camp, at home games, during preseason activities and in staff meetings. “It was my first exposure to the NBA, and I was a G League coach,” Daigneault said, adding that he knew nothing about the league at the time and that Brooks “opened the door.”
Redick described a similar sense of endorsement when he was being discussed as a possible Lakers coach during the 2024 offseason. He said he was hearing from “20, 25 people across the NBA” urging him to hire Brooks, and that once he had the job, he wanted to spend enough time with Brooks to know whether he fit. “I felt like somebody that if I was going to spend a lot of time around someone I wanted it to be Scott Brooks,” Redick said.
That search seems to have paid off. Redick said Brooks has become “an amazing basketball coach,” “an even better person” and “an incredible mentor, an incredible sounding board and a great friend” to everyone on the staff, especially younger coaches. For two teams meeting in a best-of-seven series, the shared name in the background was more than a footnote. It was a reminder that even in a playoff game decided by a 24-second shot clock, the people shaping the matchups often matter long before the first tip.
