Within the visit In the locker room at Target Center in downtown Minneapolis, Lakers wing Austin Reeves was presented with his second game ball in four nights.
It was late in the evening on October 29th. And shortly before that, with seconds left in the game, he split a double-team the Wolves at the top of the key and knocked down a floater to steal the game for the Lakers.
With ice packs wrapped around his knees, and his feet submerged in an ice bath, Reeves looked up from his phone and turned to teammate Jared Vanderbilt to offer a simple, but perhaps clarifying, question.
“What day is it?” he asked.
No one can blame Reeves for losing his bearings. It was a great week as he scored a career-high 51 points in a win in Sacramento. Los Angeles dropped 41 points over the Portland Trail Blazers the next night; Then he backed himself up two days later with a 28-point, 16-assist masterpiece capped by a buzzer-beater.
It was the best 96 hours of the 27-year-old guard’s steadily rising five-year NBA career. This was a lone tournament, with LeBron James and Luka Doncic absent due to injury.
With the Lakers’ lofty 8-3 record largely fueled by Reeves, their star rise puts them squarely in the middle of two major storylines:
1: Helping the Lakers win early and often enough to convince James that his best chance at winning the ultimate title remains in Los Angeles.
but …
2: Playing so well that it could cost the same Lakers nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to retain him.
Back in the locker room, Reeves ignored what he estimated were more than 500 unread text messages from people who responded to his series of exploits. Amid a mixture of exhaustion and fandom, he popped the question to Vanderbilt as he was trying to figure out if he could catch the Los Angeles Dodgers playing in the World Series in person.
Vanderbilt told him it was Wednesday.
While the Reeves and Lakers were busy beating the Timberwolves, the Dodgers had dropped Game 5 at home to fall 3-2 to the Toronto Blue Jays.
He started calculus.
With the World Series moving to Canada for the final two games, and the Lakers having another game in Memphis on Friday, it is clear to Reeves that he can reach Game 7 in Toronto if the Dodgers can win Game 6. He’ll just have to get from Memphis to Toronto, then back to Los Angeles for Sunday’s game against the Miami Heat, at his own expense.
Vanderbilt then said the quiet part out loud, emphasizing how Reeves’ week not only moved Los Angeles up in the standings, but may also have padded the impending free agent’s future bank account.
“I’m not going to lie, if I had 50 winners in the same week, I’d get pajamas,” Vanderbilt said, using the abbreviated name for a private jet used only by people who regularly fly private jets.
“Yes, right,” Reeves said. “I’ll take Southwest. I’m broke.”
“Not for long,” Vanderbilt responded sarcastically.
For how much intrigue lies at the intersection of James’ career coming to an end and the beginning of the Doncic era in Los Angeles, it’s Reeves’ continued rise that may be the real deciding factor of the season.
Once Reeves proved his mettle in his presence, he confirmed it in his absence. The Lakers looked listless in a 122-102 loss to the undermanned Atlanta Hawks on Saturday to begin their current five-game road trip, when Reeves missed a third straight game with a right groin strain.
It’s a value proposition being watched in Los Angeles — and around the league.
“AR is a nail-biter,” one Eastern Conference front office executive told ESPN. “If I were the Brooklyn Nets, I’d spend all the money on him. He’s shown that when he gets the keys to the engine, he can produce.”
Reaves shares the same championship goal as his All-NBA teammates but also carries a personal ambition to get paid when he hits unrestricted free agency this summer.
“Ultimately, the success of the team will help me,” Reeves told ESPN. “(If you help us), it will help me in the long run, when you win.”
On June 23, A day after the NBA Finals ended, Reeves and his agents, AMR’s Aaron Riley and Reggie Perry, joined a video call with acting Lakers governor Jeanie Buss, president of basketball operations and general manager Rob Pelinka, and coach JJ Redick, sources familiar with the call told ESPN.
The purpose of the virtual call was for the Lakers to offer Reaves a four-year, $89 million contract extension.
Once pleasantries are exchanged and an offer is made, Reeves and Reddick exited the call, while Reilly, Perry, Buss and Pelinka remained to discuss Reeves’ future and the direction of the franchise, sources said. The sources said that the call lasted in total for about 45 minutes.
The Lakers were just checking the box. They offered the most they could under the collective bargaining agreement, and Pelinka knew Reeves would turn it down. Reeves and his camp knew and appreciated this exercise.
The starting annual salary offer of $19.5 million would have been more than 2,000% more than his rookie season, when he made $925,000, and he signed with Los Angeles after going undrafted. and a 40% raise from his 2025-26 salary, the third year of a four-year, $54 million deal he signed in 2023.
“There was a lot of pride and appreciation when we received that offer,” Perry told ESPN. “But we knew it wasn’t the right time to take her.”
The raise would have made Reaves the 24th highest-paid point guard in the league, up from 26th, according to ESPN NBA front office insider Bobby Marks.
This summer, Reeves is eligible to sign a five-year, $241 million deal with the Lakers, and a four-year, $178.5 million deal elsewhere, according to Marks. The first-year salary of $41.5 million makes up 25% of the salary cap in 2026-27.
Next year it will be a show. People really have no idea what is coming. He continues to be featured in trade rumors for second-string positions. @TheRealReggieB https://t.co/Q6ROei9DNi
– Aaron Reilly (@AMRAgency) May 24, 2025
Reeves is not obsessed with making every possible dollar on his next deal, but he knows there is a range based on industry standards, sources said.
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.
As the league has grown since then, thanks to a new multibillion-dollar TV rights deal, a player who makes 20% of the cap in the 2026-27 season would make about $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,” Reeves told ESPN. “Even though I turned down another extension, it doesn’t mean I’m trying to get a huge, meaningless number. I want to be here, I want to win. I want to do everything that can help this organization be better. So I’m not trying to think about those things.”
Riddick spent Summer encourages Reeves to want more.
“The most important thing is that he took a step forward as a leader and realized that this is as much about his team as it is LeBron’s team or Luka’s team,” Redick told ESPN. “And recognizing that he has innate, natural leadership skills and the ability to utilize them more consistently. I told him he no longer has excuses. You’re no longer the unpolished guy that was a young player. You’re one of the (main) players now, and he was very responsive to that.”
This message was repeated over and over again: at the practice facility, on the golf course, through late-night texts and calls.
“He basically grabbed me and said, ‘Obviously this isn’t on you, but take control. Be a leader,'” Reeves told ESPN. “It was the same talk over and over again which was: ‘Your teammates like you,’ which I don’t even know if they actually do, but he kept telling me. … ‘It’s kind of like hiding in the back.’ “You have to take charge, speak up and be a leader of this team.”
While James was sidelined with sciatica, kept in Los Angeles for rehab during the team’s early-season road trips, and Doncic missed four of the first 11 games with a sprained finger on his left hand and a bruise on his lower left leg, the team responded to the play and character of Reeves.
“He’s kind of that sarcastic a-hole that everyone loves,” Lakers center Jackson Hayes told ESPN. “But you can tell he really cares about everyone on the team.”
For his part, Doncic noted this crucial step for the future of the Lakers. Because despite all the talk about what the Lakers’ future might look like with Doncic, the franchise is looking for long-term pieces to put alongside him.
While Reeves learned years ago how to thrive alongside James, he quickly developed his own communication style with Doncic.
Their friendship, or “bromance,” as multiple team sources described it to ESPN, runs on a constant stream of teasing and humor in the locker room.
When Reeves told ESPN that he thought Doncic could average 40 points this season, Luka smiled and said, “Austin is stupid.”
Days later, when asked to describe Doncic, Reeves responded: “He’s an idiot.”
“They both realized they enjoyed trash talk — a lot,” Reddick said. “And their personalities are very similar in that respect. And so they can create a little bit of chemistry with each other just by being their normal selves.”
Reeves’ early-season dominance serves another purpose, too — as a very public success story for the Lakers’ player development program: from the scouting department that identified him coming from Oklahoma, to its front office that promoted him from a two-way contract to a standard roster spot after his first training camp, to the player development and coaching staff that helped his growth.
“We kind of have a similar story — an undrafted guy — so we’re definitely going to do our best to learn and see everything he does and try to be something like him,” Chris Mannion, the Lakers rookie currently on a two-way contract, told ESPN. “Because that would make for a great career for me.”
Bronny James too. “He’s one of the guys I like to study,” James told ESPN. “How he uses his body against bigger defenders. He likes to stick his shoulder into bigger defenders and throw them off balance…and he stops on a dime really well and sets up ball screens really well. I like to look at that a lot and try to execute that.”
Lakers forward Jake Laravia, who signed with Los Angeles as a free agent this summer, was also drawn to Reeves’ story.
“One of the reasons I chose the Lakers organization is because you see the player development and how Austin has been one of the players that gets better every year in every category,” La Ravia told ESPN.
Three weeks into the season, Reeves is the focal point of a Lakers team near the top of the Western Conference standings. It is a place and a role that does not want to change.
“I’ve always approached it as do what you have to do to help the team,” Reeves said. “So, obviously I’ve taken steps and gotten better. The coaching staff has put more responsibility on me. But with them doing that to me, it shows me that this is what I need to do to help us.”
“Obviously things will change when Bron comes back, but it will come back to the question: What can I do to keep this train running?”
