The LA guard’s huge week for the Lakers without LeBron James and Luka Dončić shows that he’s ready for a massive pay raise in free agency.
With LeBron James out to start the season with sciatica in his right side and Luka Dončić out this week with a sprained finger and a leg contusion, the Los Angeles Lakers were suddenly without their two biggest stars, who combined to average 52.6 points per game last season. Tasked with being the team’s unquestioned lead option on offense, Austin Reaves nearly accounted for that total by himself on Sunday.
The 27-year-old guard put up an absurd stat line of 51 points, 11 rebounds, and nine assists in an LA win over Sacramento and followed that up the next night with 41 points in a loss to Portland. Reaves quickly showed us what he could do if he were given the keys to a team’s offense, and it will help him make a lot of money next summer.
Reaves has a $14.9 million player option after this season, and could see himself more than double the $13.9 million he’s making this season in unrestricted free agency. It’s been an improbable rise from relative obscurity to scoring 51 on a Sunday night for the NBA‘s most popular, glamorous franchise.
After going undrafted out of Oklahoma in 2021, Reaves signed a two-way deal with the Lakers that was converted the next month into a two-year, $2.49 million deal. He quickly established himself as a key rotation contributor and a fan favorite, averaging 13 points per game on 39.8% shooting from three in 2022-23, earning a four-year, $53 million contract extension that was seen as a triumph for a player from rural Arkansas who rose from relative anonymity. A little more than two seasons later, it’s clear that Reaves has vastly outgrown this contract.
While next season’s salary cap will only increase 7% year-over-year, lower than the maximum 10% allowed under the current collective bargaining agreement, there should still be enough competition in free agency for Reaves to receive a significant pay raise even if he doesn’t re-sign with the Lakers. If Immanuel Quickley is earning $32.5 million per season with the Toronto Raptors on a five-year, $162 million contract, Reaves should rightfully ask for an average annual salary in that $30-35 million range. And Reaves is a key component in what’s shaping up to be a fork-in-the-road type of offseason for the purple and gold.
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The Lakers’ new ownership group, led by Mark Walter, is expected to be approved by the league as soon as this week, and Dončić is clearly the franchise player the team is building around moving forward. James is also an unrestricted free agent after the season, when he’ll be 41 years old. He doesn’t fully control his own future for the first time in his all-time great NBA career.
Will LA prioritize bringing Reaves back over LeBron (which is a crazy sentence to even type out)? Will they try to bring James and Reaves back on short-term, one-year contracts to save up for a stacked 2027 free agency class led by Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokić, Stephen Curry, Donovan Mitchell, and many other superstars? Many options are on the table for the Lakers, who could conceivably choose payroll flexibility over locking Reaves into a contract that would likely take him past his 30th birthday.
If anything, this week has been and will be an audition for Reaves to show teams with potential cap space next summer, like Brooklyn or Detroit, that he’s more than capable of successfully handling a much larger role in an NBA offense, though he did commit an alarming eight turnovers in Monday’s loss to the Trail Blazers. But if the first two games this week are any indication, it shows that Reaves is ready for a primary, starring offensive role on an NBA team and the lucrative contract that goes with it.
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