General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202610 min read

Mind the Game with LeBron James and JJ Redick

Mind the Game with LeBron James and JJ Redick is a basketball podcast and video series launched in March 2024, in which Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James and then-ESPN analyst and former NBA guard JJ Redick discuss tactics, scheme, and the state of the game in extended conversations. It is produced by James's Uninterrupted and Redick's ThreeFourTwo Productions, and from its second season onward it has been distributed by Wondery, an Amazon company, with James hosting alongside the two-time NBA MVP Steve Nash after Redick left to coach the Lakers.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
First episode	"What Makes a Great Basketball Player?", published March 19, 2024³
Original hosts	LeBron James and JJ Redick; produced by Uninterrupted and ThreeFourTwo Productions¹
Season 1 length	Nine episodes, the last published just before the 2024 NBA Finals⁴
Host change	Redick was hired as head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers in June 2024; Steve Nash joined as co-host for season 2⁵^•⁴
Distribution	Wondery deal announced March 26, 2025, covering Amazon services, YouTube, and podcast platforms²
Episode counts	Season 1: 9 episodes; Season 2: 17; Season 3: 11, per JustWatch⁶
Reach	About 910,000 YouTube followers; the debut episode drew roughly 4.5 million views³

Spoilers

Plot

Season 1 (2024)

The series opens on March 19, 2024, with an episode titled "What Makes a Great Basketball Player?" There is no studio set, no audience, and no rundown of the day's news: two men in a room with a microphone and a shared vocabulary. The first conversation defines terms like "Floppy" and "Horns Chest," applies them to Jayson Tatum's leap with the Boston Celtics and what makes that team dangerous, then widens out to Stephen Curry's influence on how the game is played.¹⁵ Every later episode follows the same method: a topic, a play, or an era, taken apart until the listener can see the floor the way the people on it do.

The early episodes lean on James' willingness to be a student as much as a teacher. Redick gets him to explain how Orlando's spread offense in the 2009 Eastern Conference Finals confounded James' Cavaliers, and to assess his own poor play in the 2011 Finals against Dallas, the series most often held against him. James also admits, with a laugh, that he looks up his own highlights.¹⁶ Episode 4 covers the explosion of women's college basketball around Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, argues that "screen assist" should be an official stat, names the Gortat screen as a skill, and maps how Nikola Jokic reads the court.¹⁷

The episode that people remember is Episode 4, "The Space, The Icons and The Block," in which James dissects his own famous chase-down block on Andre Iguodala in Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals. He walks through the play as a chain of decisions rather than a miracle of athleticism: reading the score and the clock, deciding not to gamble earlier, sprinting the length of the floor while tracking Iguodala's path to the rim, and timing the swipe so the ball meets glass instead of a whistle. The detail that surprises most listeners is his insistence on J.R. Smith's role, because Smith's positioning and the threat he posed are what allowed the whole sequence to unfold the way it did.¹⁷ The Athletic called this breakdown the peak of LeBron analysis on the show, thorough and detailed in a way no highlight clip can be.¹⁶ James gives equal time to his triumphs and his struggles, and credits Chris Bosh with adapting his own game to make the Miami Heat's live experiment work.¹⁶

The first run builds toward the 2024 NBA Finals, and the final episode with Redick, published June 5, 2024, is a preview of that series. The run ended after Redick was hired as head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, the team James plays for, an announcement the Lakers made on June 24, 2024.¹⁸

Later seasons

Season 3 is hosted by James alongside Steve Nash, the two-time NBA MVP, breaking down plays and strategy and tracing how basketball keeps evolving into one of the most tactical sports on the planet.¹⁹

Characters

LeBron James is the show's centerpiece and its living archive. At 39, still averaging 25.5 points, 8.1 assists, and 7.2 rebounds per game while recording the podcast, he speaks as an active player with two decades of film in his head, equally willing to explain a coverage or confess a failure.²⁰ He says he started the show because he felt the game's essence was being lost to daily debate television and he wanted to teach what basketball truly means.²¹

JJ Redick is the analyst and the listener. A 15-year NBA veteran who had built his own podcast and joined ABC/ESPN's Finals coverage, he steers the conversations with specific questions, gets James to open up about 2009, 2011, and 2016, and treats the tactical material with a coach's seriousness. Within months of the first run ending he was an NBA head coach.²²

Steve Nash takes Redick's chair for Season 3, bringing two MVP awards and a point guard's obsession with spacing and decision-making to the same format.¹⁹

Interpretations and controversies

A launch clip drew criticism on social media before the series premiered, with confusion and mockery aimed at the idea of two NBA insiders devoting an hour to hardcore X's and O's.²³ Awful Announcing judged the first 40 minutes granular, prescriptive, and jumpy, noting that a youth coach could email it to his players and hoops hounds would devour it, but that the average Lakers fan or casual podcast listener might skip it.¹⁰ When Redick took the Lakers job, fans and media debated whether the podcast had been an audition; the show itself went quiet rather than addressing it.¹⁸

Sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations

The series continued past the Redick era with Nash as co-host for Season 3, keeping the format and the title.¹⁹

Format and content

The show is built around long-form conversations about how basketball is actually played. Its own description promises a weekly sit-down to "discuss the state of the game, dissect X's and O's, and wax poetic about the game they love," with X's and O's referring to tactical diagrams of plays and formations.⁷ The debut episode asked what makes a great basketball player and moved through the Lakers' recent comeback win over the Los Angeles Clippers, basketball IQ, named concepts such as "Thumb Down," "Floppy," and "Horns Chest," Jayson Tatum's development with the Boston Celtics, and Stephen Curry's influence on the sport.³ Later season 1 episodes covered the hardest actions to guard, the evolution of the game, spacing, the NBA Playoffs, and how three-point shooting changed basketball.⁸

The series is released in both audio and video form. The video version is shot in an intimate style, with wine bottles around the set, and opens with Redick laying out a glossary of terms on paper or a whiteboard before the discussion begins.⁹ The shared love of wine that the two hosts brought to the show's origin was designed as a through line of the series.¹

Origin and launch

The idea came from a dinner. According to Front Office Sports, James and Redick conceived the podcast while talking hoops over dinner and wine in Las Vegas during the NBA In-Season Tournament, which the Lakers went on to win. The show launched with no media or advertising partners, because the two wanted the format to be entirely their own, and James announced it on March 18, 2024.¹

Reviewers placed the show firmly on the analytical end of sports media. Awful Announcing called it a cross between Redick's interview show The Old Man & the Three and Detail, Kobe Bryant's breakdown series for ESPN Plus, describing it as granular and prescriptive and aimed in part at young players rather than the casual fan.¹⁰ In The New Yorker, the premise itself was the story: Jay Caspian Kang, a staff writer at the magazine, asked whether a show in which the players themselves explain the game's intricacies could change how sports are covered, since it bypasses the writer's usual role as translator.⁹

The coaching move and the Nash era

Season 1 ended after nine episodes, with the final installment published just before the 2024 NBA Finals between the Boston Celtics and Luka Dončić's Dallas Mavericks. Weeks later, Redick was hired as head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, his first coaching job, and the Associated Press noted that the podcast collaboration was already popular, with listeners impressed by the duo's discussion of tactics and motivation.⁴^•⁵ The show's producer said the Lakers job never came up between James and Redick during recordings.¹¹

Steve Nash took the second chair. In March 2025, James announced that the Hall of Fame point guard and two-time NBA MVP would replace Redick as co-host, and Amazon's Wondery signed a multiyear deal to distribute the series and represent its ad sales across Prime Video, Amazon Music, Fire TV Channels, Echo devices, YouTube, and podcast platforms. Uninterrupted continued to produce the show, and the deal included ad-free listening on Wondery+ and Amazon Music plus non-exclusive merchandise rights.² The Nash seasons broadened the format with recurring guests, including Tyrese Haliburton, Shaquille O'Neal, Austin Reaves, Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, and Luka Dončić, and moved to a cadence of new episodes every other Tuesday.¹²^•¹³

Reception and reach

The show's audience grew quickly. The Mind the Game YouTube channel reached about 910,000 followers, and the debut episode accumulated roughly 4.5 million views and 188,000 likes.³ Podcast analytics list the series with 61 episodes, about 68 million YouTube views, and a 4.8 rating from 3,460 ratings on Apple Podcasts.¹⁴ The video version also streams on Amazon Prime Video, where it is presented as a television series with seasons and episodes.⁶

Commentary on the show has centered on its depth rather than its entertainment value. Awful Announcing judged the dense tactical talk a "basketball nerd's dream" that might lose more casual viewers, while The New Yorker's Kang framed the show as a test of whether audiences want the game explained by the people who play it at the highest level, rather than translated for them by journalists.¹⁰^•⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026