JJ Redick, Ur-Athlete Podcaster, Takes His Biggest Shot Yet

Photo: Mind the Game Podcast via YouTube

This article originally appeared in 1.5x Speed. To receive weekly podcast news and analysis from Nick Quah, sign up for the newsletter here.

Before the Kelce Brothers cemented their standing as blue-chip podcasters in part through Travis’s ascent to Lord of the Swifties, before the Warriors press corp briefly pinned Draymond Green’s poor outing in the 2022 playoffs on his extracurricular podcasting activities, and long before the rise of the rest of the sprawling athlete sports podcast industrial complex we know today, there was J.J. Redick.

A retired NBA sharpshooter and former college hoops villain, Redick is something of an audio pioneer. His first exploits in the medium dates back to 2016, when he became what the NBA trumpeted as the first active player with a weekly podcast. That endeavor was distinct for the period, since the only athletes doing regular media work prior to that time were retired. Redick was then playing for the Lob City-era Clippers, and a considerable part of what made his show — originally called The Vertical Podcast, later rechristened to the punny The Chronicles of Redick — interesting was the immediate proximity he provided to life inside the league. And you know what? He delivered on the promise.

One of his earliest episodes saw him candidly recap the 2016 All-Star Weekend, where the three-point specialist crashed out of the three-point contest in the first round. The insights felt fresh and unique, and Redick came across as a confident, if raw, presence behind the mic. Perhaps drawing from his career as a utility player, he seemed comfortable being the sideshow whenever slotted into the role of interviewer, which happened often, since the main audience development strategy for shows of that nature tends to be booking other players. Redick stuck to the grind, and the reps paid off. By the time he started The Old Man & The Three (again, punny) in with producer and collaborator Tommy Alter over the pandemic summer, Redick had evolved into a solid mic handler. So solid, in fact, that he’s become a key member of the ESPN-ABC broadcasting team, appearing as a commentator on NBA games and joining the worldwide leader’s morning panel shows.

This week brought another interesting development in the audio career of J.J. Redick: Tuesday marked the launch of Mind the Game, in which he pairs up with LeBron James for a podcast featuring two informed NBA athletes — one a legend, one a respected hired gun — to talk nuts and bolts of basketball strategy. The technical hook is interesting, since it differentiates the project from the conventional recap structure or nostalgia dispensing that defines so much of the genre, plus Redick gets to lean further into his growing proficiency as an analyst and interpreter for the masses.

The fact that James, one of the greatest athletes ever to walk this planet, deigns to wade into the podcast trenches must be some sort of high water mark for what is already a tidal wave of a genre. You must have noticed by now that we’re positively neck-deep in pods hosted by athletes, active and retired. This is true even if we just limited our purview to the NBA, which is the subgenre I’m most familiar with. To rattle off just a handful: Current New Orleans Pelicans guard (and journalism major) CJ McCollum hosts an eponymous show for ESPN. In New York, Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart have the surprisingly delightful Roommates Show, which is almost certainly going to turn out to be the most success a modern Knicks franchise will get to experience. I’m technically colleagues with Andre Iguodala and Evan Turner, who host Point Forward for SB Nation. (Which is owned by Vulture’s parent company, Vox Media, though I don’t see Iggy or Evan on Slack.) Meanwhile, the retired Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson have a show, All the Smoke, that’s consistently exploded all over social media for its mining of hoops nostalgia through prodigious guest booking. There’s the aforementioned Draymond Green Show, the Pat Beverley Show, Paul George does one, and even the once-prolific Twitter poster himself, Kevin Durant, gets behind a mic on occasion, though the publishing schedule for his show is very erratic.

Those podcasts aren’t all good, of course. In fact, most of them are middling at best. But sometimes, they can be genuinely great and revealing. As the renowned non-athlete basketball podcaster Jason Concepcion once told me of All the Smoke: “You know what else I love about that podcast? Whether it’s Shaq, Magic, or James Worthy, a lot of these players from the eighties and nineties generation go on that show, and it’s very obvious who’s been going to therapy.”

Mind the Game represents an escalation of sorts, in that it comes right up to the line of being too technical. The first episode, which is organized around a loose discussion of what makes a great player, is punctuated by extremely granular breakdowns of specific plays. In one example, James talks through typical options that emerge from a “thumb down” play: “Because I have a left-handed point guard, he wants to come [through the] middle with his strong hand, he has the ability to hit the pocket pass with his left hand, he has the ability to throw ahead with his leftie, and he also has the ability to throw back on shake.” (In the YouTube version, James’ description is overlaid with clips to illustrate the play he’s talking about, which may indicate that Mind the Game is better as a video product than an audio one.) At times, despite being a fairly devoted NBA fan, I could barely keep up. But that itself offers a certain kind of pleasure—at least speaking for myself, a person who enjoys listening to the esoterica of Odd Lots, Bloomberg’s economics podcast, despite having a nominal understanding of the discipline. For listeners with actual background in playing high-level hoops, it may well be nirvana.

We’ll see if Mind the Game commits to the bit, or even if it lives past a handful of episodes. Big names don’t always lead to big follow-throughs, you know? In any case, the video version of the first episode already features the two men talking over a desk that’s littered with open wine bottles (James is a notable oenophile), so I guess we can already mark Mind the Game down as an achievement in podcast aesthetics.

All of which is to say, J.J. Redick is now operating in a world he helped pioneer, and it’s interesting to see how he’s evolved as a podcaster within that context. In some senses, he’s become more of a throwback. As Bomani Jones recently pointed out, the ur-text of the athlete podcast genre can technically be identified as Jalen & Jacoby, which launched all the way back in 2011 and whose eleven-year run established the formula of pairing a pro athlete (in that case, the retired Jalen Rose) with some rando (David Jacoby, then a broadcaster at ESPN in the Bill Simmons orbit). In that composition, the rando mostly serves as the set-up man; the alley to the former athlete’s oop. On The Vertical Podcast, The Chronicles of Redick, and The Old Man & The Three, Redick was the focal point as the pro athlete, with his co-host Tommy Alter functioning as the rando. With Mind the Game, Redick crosses over into the other side. As he enjoys more success as a media operator, he’s become more entrenched in the position of setting up other people now. This is perhaps the natural endpoint of a successful athlete podcast, or any pro athlete wishing to make the transition into a media career: if longevity is the endgame, the best outcome is one where the pro becomes the rando. More specifically, a decorated rando who deeply understands the nuances of a thumb down play.