JJ Redick had a relaxing summer.
You would have had a relaxing summer, too, if you signed a one year, $12 million dollar deal to re-sign with the Philadelphia 76ers.
But it almost didn’t happen. Redick nearly signed with the Pacers, as he mentioned on one of his podcasts this summer. He elaborated on that this week when he spent about an hour with ESPN’s Zach Lowe on the most recent “Lowe Post” podcast.
Lowe asked Redick how close he was to inking a deal with Indiana:
“Very. Basically I had conversations with a few teams on July 1st at midnight. Phoenix was the one team that said ‘we can make something happen straightaway.’ The Indy thing came up basically July 1 during the day. I talked to Nate McMillan for like 20 minutes one night. We were sort of waiting on LeBron, and once LeBron made his decision, then it was like the Lakers were sort involved as well. There was an opportunity (for me to go) there. But ,truthfully, I looked, I kind of knew that this is what the market was going to look like this summer. There were a couple of 2-3 year deals for less that I could have pursued. But they were not situations I thought were great situations. The Indy situation was really intriguing to me. I wouldn’t have started, but I felt like I sort of fit what they needed. And I just envisioned playing, like, two-man with (Domantas) Sabonis and getting dribble handoffs from him on that left side. He’s really good. Then it was basically deadline time, it was 3-4 hours left, and I was in the pool and my agent called and said ‘Philly changed their offer.’ Initially, I’m 34 years old and it was too much money to give up. Indy’s offer was more than Philly, not a lot, but I took less to go to Philly.”
As far as deleting his social media accounts, he says that doesn’t have anything to do with the August incident involving a courtesy car driver who may or may not have had someone locked in a cage in the backseat:
“…I had been wanting to get off of the social media for some time. And then the timing of it looks suspicious because of what happened in August with me and the car circus thing… it was like a week after that. But this was a conversation I had started in June with someone who works for me, works with me, about going to Instagram and Twitter and deleting these accounts. We finally got it done and it just happened to be the week after (the incident). If I was to want to have a public account again on Twitter or Instagram I’d have to (start from the beginning). It’s not deactivated, it’s out.”
Redick said he’s not “at liberty” to provide a follow up to the car story.
