J.J. Redick's media studies crash course

What are they teaching at Duke?

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid; Johannes Vermeer; 1670-71

J.J. Redick is batting 1.000 this week. First, he decided to join the dogpile on Doc Rivers over the Bucks coach’s weekend foray into hilarious excuse-making … leading to a response on the same network from fellow player-turned-pundit Austin Rivers.

If you’re curious about the “Pat” reference in there: Patrick Beverley said something goofy about Doc saving Redick’s career, which isn’t true, and Austin is just disavowing it.

But look at how good these guys are at this. Redick squares up on the camera knowing he’s about to go viral. His ability to turn on and off outrage is impressive. He’s watched a lot of Stephen A., Skip and the others over the years. It shows.

Rivers, for his part, comes differently … and says some absolutely brutal stuff about Redick’s game in service of defending his father. “I don’t know if there’s tension there. I know a lot of times we had to sit you toward the end of the game due to defensive reasons.” MAJOR OOF. “Our whole system was drafted around you because you’re a shooter, you’re not a guy who can put the ball on the floor. You were a strictly shoot guy, you’re not like Klay Thompson or Steph who could put the ball on the floor.” OUCH.

This is all super entertaining and interesting, because Austin is actually right: that an ESPN analyst is ripping Doc’s outer monologue is totally normal and expected; that said ESPN analyst is a former player who thrived while playing under Doc is a little weird and worth exploring more. And of course, that the player calling that out is the son of the coach in question just layers on the strange.

For what it’s worth, I mostly agree with Redick that Doc is getting exhausting. I think this vignette from Bomani Jones is spot on regarding why it’s a bit dicey for Redick to be volunteering to have this take on TV.

Anyways, you can see why all of this would go viral on the Sports Internet, right? It’s interesting, and weird, and mostly true on every side. Well, at least one person seems appalled that this went so viral. J.J. Redick returns to the plate. (Video should start at the 8:13 mark.)

I’ll be honest: I know exactly what J.J. is saying and I have no earthly idea what J.J. means.

Redick is, of course, correct: you can write or produce something detailed, educational and resource-intensive, and get a relatively modest response, and you can shoot from the hip with some half-arsed wild take and strike gold. Welcome to The Media. We learned this in the first week of the first class in J-school. Salacious, controversial, emotional: these are traits that makes something pop to an audience. This is so basic as to make me believe that Redick is playing dumb — he’s not possibly this naive to as actually be surprised that a nerdy breakdown of the New Orleans Pelicans isn’t doing the same traffic as a loud national TV takedown of his high-profile former coach.

What I don’t understand is Redick then ripping fans over the disparate reach of the content types. He asks if “fans” want to be educated as if there is a Singular and Universal “Fans.” The fans who might consume a First Take screaming fit or a deep-dive on Point Zion or something in between (like J.J.’s successful take video about fixing All-Star, which has a half-million views) exist on multiple planes.

There are casual sports fans who have ESPN on in the background at work, home, the gym, the waiting room. There are devoted fans of a particular team. There are generalist NBA fans. And all of these fans exist on spectrums of interest level and media fluency. Put something spicy on T.V. and a lot of them will notice one way or another. Put something far more specific and with a certain level of basketball knowledge required to appreciate it and a certain level of media fluency to be exposed to it, and of course the audience is going to be smaller.

My dad has become a hardcore Thunder fan. He turns 75 this year. He’s not going to be exposed to J.J. Redick’s YouTube videos or podcasts about Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren. It’s just not in his media diet, even though he’d love it. (Us digital-first sons can do but so much!) There are much more savvy 75-year-olds out there — including some subscribers to this newsletter, I reckon — but my dad just isn’t there. And guess what? By and large, the media personalities and producers on the most accessible platforms — ESPN, the national TV pregame, postgame and halftime shows, the actual game broadcasts — have the ability to give their large audience more bespoke content. They choose the spicy off-court content, the hypotheticals, the gossip instead.

J.J. has agency here. Not a ton — we constantly get peeks behind the curtain to learn that ESPN’s producers, in particular, block out their studio shows to hit on the jackpot debates of the day and default to arguing about the highest-profile teams when all else fails. But Redick has a platform that other basketball tacticians can only dream of. And Redick has often used that platform for good! He brings the excellent Nekias Duncan and Steve Jones on for regular appearances. He uplifts Tim Legler, who has been one of ESPN’s secret weapons for years now. He gets into detail when he interviews current players. (He’s one of the best interviewers right now.) He has the capacity in his career and life to do a lot between the T.V. stuff, calling games and the podcast/YouTube channel, and he’s taken advantage of that self-made capacity to do a lot of different things.

So why on Earth is Redick yelling at fans for his nerdy content not performing as well as his spicy content? If he hates the hot take stuff so much, why is he regularly appearing on a show called First Take? Does J.J. Redick need the money? I suspect not. Is he trying to sabotage ESPN’s most successful studio show from the inside? I suspect not. So why play ball if the game is rigged? That’s a question for J.J., his agent and his team to answer.

If you want to do T.V. for ESPN, this appears to be part of the deal. What’s interesting to ponder is whether ESPN and TNT producers and personalities could expand the audience for the more nitty-gritty basketball content simply by uplifting it more. Zach Lowe, for his part, brings an analytic edge to NBA Today and his appearances on other ESPN shows while also accepting the central thrust of those vehicles without lament. Some of the broadcast teams do it, too. In-market local game broadcasts have done a really good job, in large part, adding some of the more detailed analysis (albeit usually in service of hyping up the local team). I’m not an NFL fan these days, but I do notice that — much like when I was a kid waking up to Ron Jaworski chewing tape at 6 AM on weekends in the ‘90s — NFL coverage on ESPN appears much more analytic than the NBA’s dominant take artistry, though obviously Dallas Cowboys coverage overshadows a ton. Perhaps I’ve curated my media diet to only be exposed to the breakdowns and not the hot takes, though.

On the NBA side, here’s the good news: there has never been so much of this analytic, tape-breakdown style of content available. Between Duncan and Jones’ The Dunker Spot, Zach’s nerdy podcasts and columns, the Nate Duncan-Danny Leroux universe of content, Kevin Pelton and others at ESPN, Caitlin Cooper, Chris Herring, Tom Haberstroh, Jared Dubin, Thinking Basketball, a whole directory of local team podcasters and bloggers and newsletterists, The Athletic folks (both national voices like John Hollinger and the often analytic-infused beat writers), The Ringer folks (website and podcast), Secret Base’s Dorktown and dozens more I’m leaving out, there is too much Xs and Os content for a person to consume consistently. This stuff barely existed two decades ago. There was 82games.net and some bloggers. A few nerds and I briefly published a Baseball Prospectus style website whose name I have forgotten during the early APBRmetric movement. We’d infrequently have some internal wars about, like, PER and Paul Millsap that would leak out into broader consciousness. There was nothing like the scale and scope of what’s out there now. (Sidenote: this is why I largely have moved away from producing this type of work. It’s very time-intensive and there are a thousand people who do it better than I ever did.)

The content exists. The audience is there. The audience is just never going to compare in scale to a retired player screaming directly into the camera about their old coach while sitting in between dudes nicknamed “Screamin’ A” and “Mad Dog.” It’s not up to the mythical entity called “Fans” to reject the diet they’ve been served for two decades in favor of the other stuff hiding on the internet. And there’s no value judgment between the options: people like what they like.

It’s up to J.J. Redick to decide what kind of food he is personally going to serve the customer. You can do both, as he’s pulling off now. But you don’t get to act holier than the masses while you’re dishing out the stuff you claim to lament.

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Schedule

We have NBA basketball, folks! And a lot of it. All times Eastern.

Magic at Cavaliers, 7
Pistons at Pacers, 7
Knicks at Sixers, 7
Nets at Raptors, 7
Suns at Mavericks, 7:30, TNT — huge game, winner gets the head-to-head tiebreaker that will possibly be irrelevant due to tiebreaker rules for divisional champs
Celtics at Bulls, 8
Rockets at Pelicans, 8
Clippers at Thunder, 8 — huge game, winner gets the head-to-head tiebreaker
Wizards at Nuggets, 9
Hornets at Jazz, 9
Lakers at Warriors, 10, TNT
Spurs at Kings, 10

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Be excellent to each other.