Dave McMenamin
INSIDE THE VISITING locker room of the Target Center in downtown Minneapolis, Lakers wing Austin Reaves had just been presented with his second game ball in four nights.
It was late in the evening on Oct. 29. A short time earlier, with seconds left in regulation, he had split a Wolves double-team at the top of the key and sunk a floater to steal the game for the Lakers.
With ice bags wrapped around both of his knees, and his feet submerged in an ice bath, Reaves looked up from his phone and turned to teammate Jarred Vanderbilt to present a simple, but perhaps illustrative, question.
“What day is it?” he asked.
No one could fault Reaves for losing his bearings. It had been a dream week in which he scored a career-high 51 points in a win in Sacramento; dropped 41 points in L.A. on the Portland Trail Blazers the next night; and then one-upped himself two days later with a 28-point, 16-assist masterpiece that was capped by the buzzer-beater.
It had been the best 96-hour stretch of the 27-year-old shooting guard’s steadily ascending five-year NBA career. And it was a solo-starring act, with LeBron James and Luka Doncic sidelined with injuries.
With the Lakers’ lofty 8-3 record fueled largely by Reaves, his star rise puts him in squarely in the middle of two major storylines:
1: Helping the Lakers win early and often enough that it convinces James that his best shot to win a final title remains in Los Angeles.
But …
2: Playing so well that it might cost that same Lakers team nearly a quarter billion dollars to keep him.
Back inside the locker room, Reaves ignored what he estimated to be more than 500 unread text messages from folks responding to his string of feats. Amid a mix of exhaustion and fandom, he had posed the question to Vanderbilt because he was trying to figure out if he could catch the Los Angeles Dodgers play in the World Series in person.
It was Wednesday, Vanderbilt told him.
While Reaves and the Lakers were busy beating the Timberwolves, the Dodgers had lost Game 5 at home to fall down 3-2 to the Toronto Blue Jays.
The calculus began.
With the World Series shifting to Canada for the final two games, and the Lakers having one more game in Memphis on Friday, it dawned on Reaves that he could make it to Game 7 in Toronto if the Dodgers could win Game 6. He would just have to make it from Memphis to Toronto, and then back to L.A. for Sunday’s game against the Miami Heat, on his own dime.
Then Vanderbilt said the quiet part out loud, underlining how Reaves’ week not only lifted L.A. in the standings, but also might have also padded the future bank account of the impending free agent.
“Not going to lie, if I had 50 and a game-winner in the same week, I would be taking a PJ,” Vanderbilt said, using the shorthand name for a private jet that only people who regularly take private jets use.
“Yeah, right,” Reaves said. “I’m taking Southwest. I’m broke.”
“Not for long,” Vanderbilt quipped back.
For the amount of intrigue that resides at the intersection of James’ career nearing its end and the Doncic era beginning in Los Angeles, it’s Reaves’ continued ascension that might be the season’s true determining factor.
Just as soon as Reaves proved his mettle with his presence, he confirmed it in his absence. The Lakers looked listless in a 122-102 loss against an undermanned Atlanta Hawks team on Saturday to start their current five-game road trip, when Reaves missed a third straight game with a strained right groin.
It’s a value proposition being monitored in L.A. — and around the league.
“AR’s a stud,” an Eastern Conference front office executive told ESPN. “If I were the Brooklyn Nets, I would throw all the money at him. He has shown when he gets the keys to the engine, he can produce.”
Reaves shares the same championship goal as his All-NBA teammates but also harbors the personal aspiration to get paid when he reaches unrestricted free agency this summer.
“At the end of the day, team success is going to help me,” Reaves told ESPN. “[If I] help us, then it will help me in the long haul, when you’re winning.”
ON JUNE 23, a day after the NBA Finals ended, Reaves and his agents, Aaron Reilly and Reggie Berry of AMR Agency, joined a videoconference call with Lakers acting governor Jeanie Buss, president of basketball operations and general manager Rob Pelinka, and coach JJ Redick, sources with knowledge of the call ESPN.
The purpose of the virtual call was for the Lakers to offer Reaves a four-year, $89 million contract extension.
Once pleasantries were exchanged and the offer was made, sources said, Reaves and Redick exited the call, while Reilly, Berry, Buss and Pelinka stayed on to discuss Reaves’ future and the direction of the franchise. In total, the call lasted about 45 minutes, sources said.
The Lakers were merely checking a box. They’d offered the maximum they could under the collective bargaining agreement, and Pelinka knew Reaves would reject it. And Reaves and his camp knew and appreciated the exercise.
A starting annual salary offer of $19.5 million would’ve been more than a 2,000% raise from his rookie season, when he made $925,000, signing with L.A. after going undrafted. And a 40% raise from his 2025-2026 salary, the third year of a four-year, $54M deal he signed in 2023.
“There was a lot of pride and appreciation when we got that offer,” Berry told ESPN. “But we knew it was not the time to take it.”
The raise would have made Reaves just the 24th highest-paid shooting guard in the league, up from 26th, according to ESPN NBA front office insider Bobby Marks.
This summer, Reaves is eligible to sign a five-year, $241 million deal with the Lakers, and four years, $178.5 million elsewhere, per Marks. The first-year salary of $41.5 million constitutes 25% of the salary cap in 2026-27.
Next year is going to be a show. People really have no idea what’s to come. Keep putting him in trade rumors for second string centers. @TheRealReggieB https://t.co/Q6ROei9DNi
— Aaron Reilly (@AMRAgency) May 24, 2025
Reaves is not obsessed over earning every dollar possible on his next deal, sources said, but knows there is a range based on industry standards.
Two of his contemporaries at shooting guard, 26-year-old Jordan Poole and 25-year-old Tyler Herro, signed contract extensions with their original teams in 2022 — Golden State and Miami, respectively — that pay them 20% of the cap.
With the league’s growth since then, infused by a new, multibillion dollar television rights deal, a player making 20% of the cap in 2026-27 would be paid around $33 million.
“I try not to think about it. Honestly. I’ve said it a million times. I want to be in L.A. I love it,” Reaves told ESPN. “Even though the other extension was turned down, that doesn’t mean that I’m trying to go get a f—ing gigantic number that don’t make sense. I want to be here, I want to win. I want to do everything that can help this organization be better. So I don’t try to think about those things.”
REDICK SPENT THE summer encouraging Reaves to want more.
“The biggest thing was him taking a step forward as a leader and recognizing that it’s as much his team as it is LeBron’s team or Luka’s team,” Redick told ESPN. “And acknowledging that he does have innate, natural leadership skills and being able to tap into those more consistently. I told him, he’s out of excuses. You’re no longer the undrafted guy who’s a young player. You’re one of the [main] guys now, and he’s been very responsive to that.”
That message was reiterated over and over: at the practice facility, on the golf course, through texts and late-night calls.
“He basically pulled me in and was like, ‘Obviously this isn’t all on you, but take control. Be a leader,'” Reaves told ESPN. “The same talk over and over again was, ‘Your teammates like you,’ which I don’t even know if they actually do, but he just kept telling me. … ‘You kind of just hiding in the back is over. You have to take control and speak up and be a leader of this team.'”
While James has been sidelined with sciatica, keeping him in L.A. to rehab during the team’s early-season road trips, and Doncic missing four of the first 11 games because of a sprained finger on his left hand and a bruise to his lower left leg, the team has responded to Reaves’ play — and personality.
“He’s a bit of that sarcastic a–hole that everyone loves,” Lakers center Jaxson Hayes told ESPN. “But you can tell he genuinely cares about everyone on the team.”
Doncic, for his part, has taken notice, a critical step for the future of the Lakers. Because for all of the conversation about what the Lakers’ future with Doncic might look like, the franchise is looking for long-term pieces to place alongside him.
And while Reaves learned years ago how to thrive alongside James, he has quickly developed a communication style with Doncic that is all their own.
Their friendship, or “bromance,” as multiple team sources described it to ESPN, runs on a steady stream of teasing and locker room humor.
When Reaves told ESPN he thought Doncic could average 40 points this season, Luka smirked and said, “Austin’s stupid.”
Days later, asked to describe Doncic, Reaves answered, “He’s an idiot.”
“They both realized that they both enjoy talking trash — a lot,” Redick said. “And their personalities in that regard are very similar. And so they can create a little bit of chemistry with each other just by being their natural selves.”
Reaves’ early-season dominance serves another purpose too — as a very public success story for the Lakers’ player-development program: from its scouting department that identified him coming out of Oklahoma, to its front office that upgraded him from a two-way contract to a standard roster spot after his first training camp, to its player development and coaching staff that has aided his growth.
“We kind of have a similar story — undrafted guy — so definitely going to do the most to learn and see everything he does and try to be something like him,” Lakers rookie Chris Manon, who is currently on a two-way contract, told ESPN. “Because that would match up to a great career for me.”
Bronny James’ too. “He’s one of the guys I like to study,” James told ESPN. “Just how he uses his body against bigger defenders. He likes to put his shoulder into bigger defenders and get them off balance … and he just stops on a dime really well and sets up ball screens really well. I like to look at that a lot and try to implement that.”
Lakers forward Jake LaRavia, who signed with L.A. as a free agent this summer, also gravitated to Reaves’ story.
“One of the reasons I chose the Lakers organization was just you see the player development and how Austin was one of the guys that’s just gotten better every year in every category,” LaRavia told ESPN.
Three weeks into the season, Reaves has been the focal point on a Lakers team near the top of the Western Conference standings. It’s a perch, and a role, he doesn’t want to change.
“I’ve always approached it as, do what you have to do to help the team,” Reaves said. “So, obviously, I’ve taken steps and I’ve gotten better. The coaching staff has put more responsibility on me. But with them doing that to me, it just shows me that that’s what I have to do to help us.
“And obviously things will change when Bron gets back, but it’ll go back to, ‘What can I do to keep this train rolling?'”
