Almost a decade after he hung up his sneakers, JJ Redick is still telling Kobe Bryant stories, and his latest one explains as well as any documentary why coaches who worked with the late Lakers icon walked away looking like they had been through a war.
Now in his second season as head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, Redick was invited to recount the moment he first realised the gap between the work ethic he had been raised on at Duke and the work ethic Bryant lived by. The setting was the 2007 USA Basketball training camp in Las Vegas. Redick had just been called up to attend.
"In '07, when I got to do the training camp with you guys in Vegas, I got there on a Sunday," Redick said. "We were starting with practice on a Monday. So I get there Sunday afternoon. First thing I do is I hit up the Duke assistant coaches, Coach Collins, Coach Bojo, Coach Dawkins. I'm like, 'Can y'all meet me at the gym? I just want to get some shots up.'"
What Redick walked into instead was a portrait of a man who had already been broken by sunrise.
"I get to the gym and Johnny Dawkins looks like he lost his dog," Redick said. "Like I've never seen this guy look so just disheveled. I'm like, 'D, what's going on, man?'"
Dawkins, a respected coaching mind who would later lead Stanford and Central Florida, did not need to embellish his answer. "Man, Kobe, this guy, this guy, this guy had me up at 6:00am this morning," Dawkins replied, as Redick recalled. "He was in the gym for 3 hours and he said he was doing the same move for 3 hours."
Three hours. One move. Pre-dawn. It is the kind of detail that has lived in NBA folklore since Bryant's playing days and the years since his 2020 death, and it is the reason that even the most accomplished coaches in the world emerged from sessions with him exhausted. Redick's punchline was simply: he was impressed.
For Redick, who built a 15-year NBA career on disciplined shooting routines and one of the most documented pre-game preparations of his generation, the encounter is now part of his coaching DNA. He has spoken openly about the daily work he expects from Lakers stars LeBron James, Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves, and his bench has been reshaped this season around a model of repetition, film and individual skill workouts that older Lakers players have publicly credited for unlocking their late-season form.
The Bryant anecdote also lands at a moment when the Lakers, in the thick of a postseason chase, are leaning on their veterans for late-game possessions in exactly the kind of situations Bryant used to dominate. Redick's job is, in part, to translate the standard he saw in that Vegas gym onto a younger group that has never shared a floor with the man who set it.
A coach is shaped by what he sees as a player. JJ Redick saw, in one early Sunday in Las Vegas, a 6am alarm, a single move repeated to exhaustion, and a Duke assistant left looking like he had lost his dog. The Mamba Mentality was never an abstract slogan. It was a man, a gym, and three hours.
