Austin Reaves did his damnedest. After missing the Los Angeles Lakers’ final five regular-season games and the first four games of the 2026 NBA playoffs with a Grade 2 oblique strain, the sweet-shooting guard logged long hours in a hyperbaric chamber to fast-track the healing process in hopes of getting back on the court as soon as possible. He returned in time to help the Lakers knock off the Houston Rockets without Luka Dončić in Round 1 and averaged nearly 21 points and seven assists per game against the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference semifinals, capped by a team-high 27 points, 7 rebounds and 6 assists in 43 minutes on Monday.
It was a valiant effort, but not enough to prevent the defending champs from finishing off their second straight 4-0 sweep to send the Lakers into an offseason teeming with questions.
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Foremost among them, obviously, is what comes next for LeBron James — whether his Hall of Fame run as a Laker is at an end, whether his entire career is at an end, or whether the 41-year-old will choose to push his unprecedented longevity forward elsewhere. There’s also the question of whether to use the three first-round draft picks they’re now eligible to trade — the 25th pick in June’s 2026 NBA Draft, plus their firsts in 2031 and 2033 — in pursuit of a needle-moving superstar partner for Dončić. (Like, say, a really big Greek guy.)
Not far behind, though, is what comes next for Reaves — whom the Lakers signed to a two-way contract after he went undrafted out of Oklahoma in 2021, and who turned into one of the franchise’s great recent player-development success stories. He’s cemented himself as one of the league’s most efficient, effective and malleable offensive playmakers, capable of producing on or off the ball at a borderline All-Star level.
Asked Monday night what he plans to do next, the fifth-year pro made it clear that he’s not exactly the “planning” type.
“I’m gonna be honest,” Reaves told reporters after Game 4. “I’ve been around for five years, and I would say you all know me pretty well … I don’t think about much. I take life day by day. I’m just blessed to have an opportunity to play for this organization. I play a kid’s game. I make good money. But like I said, I don’t think about what I’m really gonna do in the future. Kind of just, day by day.”
While The Dude might abide, though, he does have an agent whose job it is to think about what comes next — and just how lucrative it might wind up being for a player who’s poised to strike it rich this summer.
The 6-foot-5 Reaves holds a $14.9 million player option for the 2026-27 season; that works out to about a little over 9% of next season’s salary cap. But after averaging more than 20 points and five assists per game on .600 true shooting in each of the last two seasons — one of just four players to hit those marks in both campaigns, alongside MVPs Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Nikola Jokić and Giannis Antetokounmpo — it seems reasonable to conclude Reaves is in line for a pretty sizable raise and would do well to opt out and enter unrestricted free agency to pursue it. Indeed, that decision has apparently already been made: Reaves “will decline his player option and become an unrestricted free agent after the season,” according to Dan Woike and Sam Amick of The Athletic.
Just how sizable depends on a few factors — starting with just how good you think Reaves really is.
Among players who appeared in at least 50 games this season, Reaves finished 16th in the NBA in ESPN’s net points added, 22nd in estimated plus-minus, 33rd in player efficiency rating, 35th in box plus-minus and xRAPM, 45th in value over replacement player and win shares per 48 minutes, 52nd in The BBall Index’s LEBRON, and 53rd in DARKO daily plus-minus. That advanced statistical résumé ballparks Reaves as roughly a top-40 player. According to Spotrac, the 40th-highest average annual contract value for next season checks in at just over $39.4 million — a figure shared by Desmond Bane, Darius Garland, Ja Morant and Zion Williamson.
If those players are in line to make about 23.9% of next season’s salary cap, it wouldn’t be a shock for Reaves’ representatives to have their sights set on a new contract starting at the maximum salary available to players with fewer than six years of NBA service time — a deal that pays 25% of the salary cap.
Based on the projected $165 million cap line for next season, such a deal would furnish Reaves with a starting salary north of $41.2 million next season. An “external suitor” would be able to offer Reaves a four-year contract with 5% raises off his Year 1 salary, which would max out at four years and $177.4 million through the end of the 2029-30 season. As the holders of Reaves’ Bird rights, the Lakers could tack on a fifth year and bump the raises up to 8%, enabling them to push a prospective offer as high as five years and $239.3 million through 2030-31. (A four-year deal in L.A. would top out at $184.8 million — a little over $7 million more than he could receive elsewhere in that span.)
Whether the Lakers would have to go that high, of course, likely depends on what kind of competition they’d face for Reaves on the open market. On one hand, Jake Fischer of The Stein Line reported back in December that it was “all but considered a lock” that Reaves would draw “max-level contract interest from external suitors as well as the incumbent Lakers,” indicating there might be a couple of teams eager to pounce and pay Reaves — likely to be the lone prime-age, star-caliber ball-handling option available in a free-agent class light on guards (especially if Trae Young, as expected, reaches an extension agreement to stay in D.C.) — to be their top playmaker should the opportunity present itself.
On the other, though, with Spotrac’s Keith Smith projecting only two teams besides the Lakers to have max-level cap space this summer — and with those teams being the Chicago Bulls, who gave Josh Giddey $100 million last summer, and the Brooklyn Nets, who drafted a bunch of ball-handlers last June and appear to be in line to pick another one next month — it’s reasonable to wonder whether Reaves, for whom “winning will be a significant factor,” according to Woike and Amick, would prioritize getting the top possible dollar from a bad-to-very-bad team over taking slightly less than the top possible dollar to stay put as Luka’s running buddy in L.A. (For what it’s worth: Smith projects that two other playoff teams — the Atlanta Hawks and the Detroit Pistons — could open up more than $27 million in cap space if they were interested in getting into the running for Reaves.)
Dončić “has made it clear to the Lakers that he would like to continue playing with Reaves,” according to Woike and Amick, liking his rim-pressuring, free-throw-generating, knockdown-shooting, pick-and-roll-playmaking presence enough that Luka reportedly “told people within the organization that he wouldn’t want Reaves included in any potential trade packages for Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo.” In a related story, according to Broderick Turner of the Los Angeles Times,“ the Lakers value Reaves and are expected to meet his demands” on a new deal to entrench the Dončić-Reaves backcourt as the centerpiece of the roster moving forward.
The early returns of that combination have been strong. The Lakers outscored opponents by nine points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions with Dončić and Reaves on the floor together this season, according to Cleaning the Glass. Filter out the possessions where James shared the court with them, and those numbers largely remained steady in a not-huge-but-not-tiny-either sample of more than 500 minutes that saw the Lakers score at a rate that would’ve ranked third in the NBA over the course of the full campaign.
The Lakers would still have plenty of questions to answer as they work to navigate a period of transition for the franchise and, in the words of president of basketball operations Rob Pelinka, “retrofit” the roster around Dončić, whose MVP-caliber campaign ended prematurely after suffering a severe left hamstring strain against Oklahoma City on April 2. (Chief among them: Can Pelinka and head coach JJ Redick build a championship-level defense around that backcourt?) Bringing back Reaves, though, would represent an important step in that process, ensuring that Dončić is flanked by a high-level on- and off-ball complement like he was in Dallas, when partnerships with Jalen Brunson and Kyrie Irving produced trips to the Western Conference finals and NBA Finals.
It sounds like both sides are eager to make that happen …
… which, if nothing else, would mean Reaves can continue not to think too hard about what he’s gonna do in the future. Nice work if you can get it.
