The Los Angeles Lakers enter the 2026 NBA Playoffs with head coach JJ Redick refusing to temper expectations. After a 15-2 March surge that dragged his team up the Western Conference standings, the first-year bench boss has repeatedly returned to the same simple idea — the Lakers are better than their uneven regular season suggested.
"We're a good, good basketball team," Redick said after a late-March win over Detroit. "I believe that we're a good basketball team. I thought we could be a good basketball team the entire season. We saw flashes of it. We saw short stretches of it, but we're a good basketball team."
Redick's conviction is underpinned by a very practical explanation for the turnaround: the Lakers finally got healthy. He has openly linked the winning streak to a roster that, for the first time all year, was close to whole on most nights.
"It is remarkable to me, and this again not an excuse, but our winning streak has also coincided with us being healthy," Redick said. "You go watch, I rewatched the first Detroit game and it's like, 'oh, this guy's out, this guy's out.'"
Asked later to break down the secret behind the Lakers' march into the top half of the West, Redick returned to the same theme with more detail.
"I think it was a confluence of things starting with health," he said. "It's much easier when you have a consistent stretch of health to settle in to roles and minutes and rotations. We never found that the first two-thirds of the season."
The on-court centrepiece of the run has been Luka Doncic. The Slovenian star logged one of the most complete months of his career in March, a stretch Redick put alongside the career peaks of the sport's modern icons.
"Luka has had as good of a month as anybody I can remember in modern NBA, at least since I've been part of it," Redick said. "Certainly LeBron has had those, Harden has had those, Steph has had those."
Doncic's ability to repeatedly touch the paint has remade the Lakers' offence. Redick singled out that habit as the reason the team's scoring baseline has climbed in recent weeks.
"He's doing a great job of touching the paint right now for us, and that's been big," Redick said. "Not just for him to score, but also for him to collapse the defense. I think that's when our offense is at its best."
LeBron James, meanwhile, continues to redraw the boundaries of a 23rd NBA season. The 41-year-old tied Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's all-time wins record, played more games than any human in league history and still guarded multiple positions on the way into the postseason. Redick, asked once more to marvel at it, sighed through a familiar answer.
"He's very praiseworthy. I don't know what else to say about him at this point," the coach said. "I've tried to give every version of the same soliloquy on his longevity, but I don't have anything for you tonight."
None of that will matter once the Rockets tip off Game 1. Redick, however, is not pretending to manage expectations. Asked what the Lakers' approach would be for the closing stretch of the regular season, he framed the whole operation in one short sentence that now reads as a mission statement for the series ahead.
"We're going to go for it," Redick said. "We're going to try to win games, and we're going to be smart about it."
