The Los Angeles Lakers will sign Austin Reaves to a huge new contract when free agency opens next week, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported on Wednesday. The deal is reportedly worth $185 million over four years; Reaves’s new annual salary of $46.5 million is a big-time raise over the $14 million he made last season. It includes a player option for the final year of the contract.
Reaves, coming off a career season, held a player option for 2026–27 worth $14.5 million that just about everybody expected him to decline in order to seek a richer deal. Thus, Wednesday’s news comes as no surprise. The 28-year-old averaged 23.3 points and 5.5 assists last season, showing he was a great fit for the Lakers as the No. 2 option offensively behind Luka Dončić.
It wasn’t all perfect, though. Reaves battled injuries throughout the season and suffered a devastating oblique injury in the final days of the regular season that kept him out of L.A.’s first four playoff games. He returned in time to help eliminate the Rockets but clearly wasn’t in playing shape. By the time he looked like his regular-season self against the Thunder in the second round, it was too late; the Lakers wound up getting swept while Reaves averaged 20.8 points on 42% shooting against the defending champs.
Nevertheless, Reaves is a key part of Los Angeles’s future now. His scoring talents take a lot of the responsibility off Dončić and gives the Lakers a go-to leader offensively when their superstar has to hit the bench. His defensive struggles means he isn’t a perfect fit alongside Dončić but his value as a scorer outweighs that most nights. Moreover, while this is quite an expensive deal for the Lakers as the maximum amount Reaves could have demanded, they are looking to contend for titles. Players like Reaves are too good to let walk out the door in free agency, which was the risk L.A. would have run if the franchise let him hit the open market without a deal in place.
Dončić has his running mate for the foreseeable future, and the Lakers’ best homegrown talent in years is staying put.
Why the Lakers had no choice but to pay Reaves big money
As noted above, the Lakers were backed into something of a corner here. Reaves was absolutely deserving of a new deal after emerging as a genuinely explosive scoring option this year with both a high floor and high ceiling in terms of production. His play was far greater than his salary last season. That kind of over-performance usually leads to a lucrative reward for anybody; given Reaves is the greatest organizational development story since Kobe Bryant this conclusion felt especially inevitable. It would have been bad business to let a player like that walk out the door.
And he very well might’ve walked out that door if Los Angeles let him hit the open market. There are a ton of talent-needy teams with a lot of money to spend who would have thrown as much money as allowed at Reaves the moment free agency opened—particularly in light of the new lottery rules that incentivizes bad teams to get a little bit better by adding players like Reaves to otherwise talent-barren rosters. He was a serious flight risk if the Lakers lowballed him. A $46.5 million annual salary might be a shocking sticker price for a player known equally for his poor defense as his electric offense but L.A. forked over the money to not only keep him around but ensure the team didn’t lose an elite talent for nothing.
And even with those defensive deficiencies, he’s a good fit alongside Dončić as a secondary scorer. Perhaps more importantly, Dončić likes him. The superstar wanted Reaves as his backcourt partner in L.A., something he “made known to Lakers executives in conversations over the past year,” The Athletic reported in the wake of the signing. The Lakers don’t want to totally kowtow to one player’s opinion but Reaves is a great player that they would have wanted to keep around anyway. The franchise star feeling the same way just meant this deal was 100% getting done, no matter what.
The deal could very well age poorly at this price point. But the Lakers had no way to replace Reaves’s production this offseason. They also had very little negotiating power beyond hoping he’d be willing to take a hometown discount, which would have been insulting given he played the last two seasons on a pretty significant discount already.
Thus, Reaves is guaranteed to be a Laker for a while yet. A touch expensive? Perhaps. But it was the only move for Los Angeles to make.
More NBA from Sports Illustrated
Listen to SI’s NBA podcast, Open Floor, below or on Apple and Spotify. Watch the show on SI’s YouTube channel.
