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JJ Redick draws from Batman, hopes his Lakers channel the ‘Dark Knight’

March 31, 2026

LOS ANGELES — Batman was the superhero of choice for JJ Redick before the Lakers faced the struggling Washington Wizards on Monday night.

Entertaining a question about what he’s learning versus what he did and did not expect across his almost first full two seasons as Lakers coach, Redick flexed his comic-book film knowledge to piece together an analogy in response.

“One of the reasons I wanted to coach was because I wanted the challenge of coaching and that’s the beautiful part of it, is that there’s a different challenge every day,” Redick said. “There’s a line in … ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ where Bane says to Batman, ‘victory has defeated you.’”

Redick said that line of dialogue – from Tom Hardy, who played the classic Batman villain in Christopher Nolan’s 2012 film – expressed the Lakers’ currently reality of being 14-2 over their previous 16 games. Redick said his challenge is to not allow victory, as Bane said, to defeat his team.

Redick continued: “You got to get your team ready to play. You can’t have complacency. You can’t get comfortable. There’s times in the season where it feels like to everyone else, the world is falling, and you’ve got to be the calm and the poised one, and you got to lead your team through that. There’s a different challenge every day.”

What Bane said, while fighting Batman the first time they square off in the film, was a speech regarding complacency. Before the comic book villain says the line which Redick shared Monday, he utters that “peace has cost you your strength.”

It’s part of why Redick used a day that could have just been an extra day of rest for his team to instead hold a practice on Sunday morning, working on after-timeout plays (ATOs) along with cleaning up the Lakers’ pick-and-roll and defensive scheming.

When asked about what his team has done best over the past six weeks, and if there could be a playoff replication of the victorious pace the Lakers have been on since the All-Star break, Redick turned to his players’ physicality.

Physicality is what might separate the Lakers from their opponents in the postseason.

“I think the playoffs are all about your matchup,” Redick said. “Certainly, the physicality ramps up, and it’s the one thing that we’ve gotten consistent and better at throughout the season. We all know what playoff basketball means in terms of the intensity of every possession, and that’s what we, from Day One of training camp, wanted to build towards. And I feel like we’re building towards that.”

SOUTH BAY OPENS PLAYOFFS ON WEDNESDAY

The top-seeded South Bay Lakers (26-10) will open the G League Playoffs against the eighth-seeded San Diego Clippers on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at UCLA Health Training Center in El Segundo. All 16 G League teams will play in a single-elimination tournament until the finals, which will be a best-of-three series.

En route to the postseason, South Bay rattled off a franchise-record 12 consecutive wins and ended the season with a .722 winning percentage, the team’s best mark since the 2011-2012 season when it was known as the Los Angeles D-Fenders.

“I think we just got great energy as a team,” said rookie forward Adou Thiero, who is nursing a knee injury but has played in 10 games with South Bay this season.

Orange County Register

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JJ Redick draws from Batman, hopes his Lakers channel the ‘Dark Knight’

SOUTH BAY OPENS PLAYOFFS ON WEDNESDAY

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