JJ Redick Says the Lakers Finally Fit. This Roster Isn't Even Finished.

Rob Pelinka won't rule out a trade just to get to 15 players, and the new defense hasn't played a regular-season minute.

JJ Redick wants you to believe the Lakers finally make sense. I think he's a season early, and the team's own president has already given the game away.

Lakers coach JJ Redick told reporters on Thursday that this was "probably the first time in my three years here that I feel like the pieces actually fit together," Silver Screen and Roll's Jackson Frank reported. It's a lovely thing to say in September. It's also a claim about a group that hasn't played a regular-season minute together, assembled by a front office that may still have to move a player just to make the count work.

Start with that count.

Lakers Nation reported that Lakers president Rob Pelinka wouldn't rule out a trade made purely to get the roster down to 15 players.

A roster you have to trim by trade isn't a finished roster. It's a draft with one contract too many.

Then look at how it got here. Once LeBron James made clear he'd leave in free agency, the Lakers signed seven free agents and brought back Austin Reaves on a four-year, $184 million deal, Frank wrote. That's a lot of introductions for a team that already supposedly fits.

We've heard this song before.

Last summer the Lakers signed Deandre Ayton, Marcus Smart and Jake LaRavia to be rotation regulars around Luka Dončić, the star they got from Dallas 19 months ago, and Frank described that roster as still in flux while the team sorted out its old and new identities. One of those regulars is already gone. Smart turned down more money from the Lakers to sign with the Houston Rockets and called their offer disrespectful. That's what a settled rotation looked like twelve months ago.

The Rockets are the second comparison, and the sharper one. They beat the Lakers in the playoffs last spring, and Houston's All-Star center, Alperen Şengün, said experience was the difference. Experience together is exactly the thing seven summer signings can't buy.

The people above Redick are new to this too. Pelinka says the front office has already met with Bob Iger and Josh Kushner, the team's new owners. And the Lakers are promising a new defensive identity this season, one that hasn't yet been tested against anybody wearing another jersey.

Now, the part Redick gets right. His real bet is hard, clear roles handed out early. "If you don't do those things, then you're not gonna play," he said, adding that those conversations had already happened with players this week. That's a risky way to run a camp, because it assigns jobs before any game has proven who deserves them. I also think it's the smartest thing he said.

Read his quote twice and my position moves. Redick is describing a coach who finally knows what he wants from each spot on the floor. That clarity is how a roster eventually comes to fit. He's standing at the start of that process and calling it the finish.

Dončić and Walker Kessler are Redick's best answer to all of this. Together they give him the cleanest two-way pairing he's had since the Lakers hired him, and a coach with a core like that has earned some September optimism.

The pairing is real. A pairing still isn't a roster, and a roster carrying one contract more than it can keep is unfinished by definition. Fit is the last man on the bench knowing he's the last man, and right now the Lakers can't even say who that is.

Pelinka still has a roster to trim, and the new defense still has its first real minute to play. When both are done, Redick can say it again, and I'll believe him.

Source: silverscreenandroll.com, retrieved September 27, 2026.