JJ Redick Says Doc Rivers is All Excuses: 'There's Never Accountability With That Guy'

JJ Redick was back on First Take today and he took the opportunity to take a direct shot at his former coach and colleague, Doc Rivers, the new head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks. Rivers is off to a 3-7 start as coach of Milwaukee and he hasn't stopped talking about how difficult things have been and he actually had the audacity to admit that he asked to wait until after the All-Star break to start the job because the team was about to embark on a very tough road trip when he took over.

Some of his comments were played on First Take on Tuesday and Stephen A. Smith and Shannon Sharpe didn't have enough to say about it so Redick stopped the show and jumped in with some very pointed criticism.

"I've seen the trend now. I've seen the trend for years! The trend is always making excuses. Doc, we get it. Taking over a team in the middle of a season is hard. It's hard. We get it. Just like getting traded in the season is always hard for a player. We get it, but it's always an excuse. It's always throwing your team under the bus. They lose to Memphis. Oh it's his players' fault. Memphis was playing G-League guys and two-way guys. Then you look at his quotes over the weekend. Now he wants to take credit for the James Harden trade to the Clippers working out? He wants credit for that? There's just no... there's never accountability with that guy. There's never accountability."

Accountability for Rivers is something that Redick had previously discussed on his podcast with Jamal Crawford in the wake of comments Doc had made about their Clippers teams.

Here's what Redick had to say about Doc Rivers taking over the Bucks in January. He understood how some people might think the move would work, but seemed very dubious about it actually working with his overall conclusion being that the move was "f-cking insane."

Clearly, there's some baggage in this relationship from their time as player and coach. However, there's an extra level of awkwardness when you remember that they were both very recently coworkers at ESPN. And Redick has been promoted to take Rivers' spot calling games - including the NBA Finals.

Obviously, there's no reason for Redick to be annoyed with that last part unless he had a vacation planned in June, but Rivers' latest tenure with ESPN sure leaves you wondering about his accountability. He took that job with ESPN last summer and was gone by January. He wasn't even halfway through his first season when he started moonlighting as an "informal consultant" with the Bucks and that transition looks super shady since the relationship didn't take very long to become formal. Not to mention it really screwed ESPN's short and longterm plans and made them look pretty bad in the process because they had dumped Jeff Van Gundy and Mark Jackson to make room for him.

It seems likely that Redick probably comes into contact with people who aren't thrilled with Rivers on a daily basis. And if the great experiment in Milwaukee doesn't work out, Redick probably won't be the last person to tee off on Rivers. He'll just have the most history with him when he does it.