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Benjamin Royer: “It’s fun,” Austin Reaves said of the Lakers’ offense clicking vs. Miami for 138 points. “Obviously, Luka is doing incredible things and when he’s doing that it just opens up the floor for everybody else to play free and confident and I felt like that’s what we did tonight.”
Though it seems that Doncic himself influenced the decision to retain Reaves in the summer due to their close relationship, according to Lakers insider Jovan Buha . "I've heard that behind the scenes, that has been reported publicly. Luka wanted Austin back. So if Luka wants Austin back, Austin's gonna be back. If Luka wants Walker Kessler, the Lakers went out and got Walker Kessler. If Luka wants some of these role players or at least signs off on them, they get him," he said on his show, Buha's Block.
Some of it is probably to be expected, though the highs the Lakers hit in their first four wins probably masked it. The reality is the team is still learning one another, learning when and how to cut, learning how to impact winning on a team and for an organization with incredibly high expectations. “We want to become a great team,” Redick said. “You don’t become a great team in six games.” Still, this was bad. “A terrible loss,” Austin Reaves muttered in the locker room.
Austin Reaves didn’t know what to think of Luka Dončić when he first met him. After the Mavericks stunningly traded Dončić to the Lakers in February 2025, the Slovenian superstar mostly kept to himself. Reaves acknowledged he didn’t even think they would become friends. “I wasn’t joking,” Reaves told the California Post in an exclusive interview. “There were times when the trade first happened where we would walk by each other in the locker room and not say anything to each other because I didn’t know what to say to him. That was the first reaction: ‘What is this guy going to be like?'”
When he first arrived in Los Angeles, his head was spinning. “For me, it’s hard to speak when I come to a new team, new people,” Dončić told The Post. “It’s kind of hard for me to speak. I had some people I knew from before, so I kind of hung out with them. But after that, in [next season’s] training camp, [Austin and I] got really close. That’s when it probably started.”
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“Once we came back for the next year, right off the bat we had similar interests,” Reaves told The Post. “We kind of act the same, which is kind of sad to say for me. But we both love joking around, having a good time.” Reaves and Dončić are both funny. They’re understated. They’re humble. They prefer spending time with their loved ones over the LA scene. Golf is their meditation.
They were there for each other through everything. “It’s very interesting how life works, and there’s certain things that happen in people’s life where you kind of create a bond over things,” Reaves told The Post. “We’re all around each other 95 percent of the time throughout the year, especially when [basketball is] in season. We might get an off-day every week or two weeks. “But you travel together and you know the things people are going through. And you just want to be there for him. And there were a couple of things on both sides where we were both going through things and having each other’s company was the best thing that could’ve happened. And it’s grown into a real relationship after that.”
Hachimura joined Clippers out of wanting to stay in Los Angeles and to take on a new challenge: seeing if he can expand his game in a different situation. Over the last three seasons, Hachimura had been on a Lakers team led by the likes of LeBron James, Luka Doncic, Anthony Davis, and Austin Reaves. With so many ball-dominant stars and elite playmakers leading the way, Hachimura fell into whatever role needed him to play.
Benjamin Royer: I’ve heard from players and personnel alike about the lack of “ego” in this Lakers group. Here’s a quote from Austin Reaves today: “The thing about our team is, there's no ego, there's no anything. Just wanna win basketball games and however that happens is the main thing.”
Later in the show, Buha was asked about adding another athletic big man to the roster and pointed toward Cisse as the type of minimum-level option he believes could thrive alongside Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves. "To me, Moussa Cisse – I don't wanna overrate Moussa Cisse – but I think he's the exact type of big that would just eat with the Lakers," Buha said. "And he would be a dynamic lob threat with Luka and Austin, and he just has to screen, roll, finish. He could do that." "He's also a solid rebounder and rim protector, at least by bench-big standards," Buha continued. "So to me, Moussa Cisse, like, you're not asking for the moon. You're not asking to draft an Aday Mara. You're not asking to add Mitchell Robinson to the bench." "Keeping it realistic with a minimum-level player, Moussa Cisse is the archetype to me."
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Benjamin Royer: Austin Reaves on Walker Kessler’s impact to help the Lakers get to 2-0 in this young season: “We wanted him for a reason and he’s shown up big these first two games,” Reaves said. “You couldn’t ask for a better start to the year.”
“You can go ask any of those GMs if they want him on their team, and they’re going to take him,” Austin Reaves told The Athletic when told of the poll results. “There’s a lot of truth in what (Draymond Green) said. Luka Doncic has done what he’s done for eight years now, and when he does it, there’s no wow factor. “There’s a wow factor when he plays, but you look at the box (score) after the game, and you’re like … ‘Oh, he had 35 (points).’ So when he has 40, people aren’t like, ‘Holy s—, he had 40!’ It’s like, ‘Oh, he did what he does every single night.’ So, I think there’s a little bit of truth in what Draymond said about voter fatigue with someone who hasn’t won it.”
Can Dončić win over LA? It’s something LeBron James struggled with despite playing eight seasons for the Lakers and leading the franchise to its first championship in 10 years in 2020 before he left for the 76ers in free agency in July. Austin Reaves believes things will play out differently for Dončić. “I think with the Bron situation it was a little different just because Bron and Kobe were battling for the best player in the NBA for multiple years, so Lakers fans at the time probably hated LeBron,” Reaves told the California Post. “Not that they didn’t accept him when he was here, but they still probably had the “Kobe is better” type of mentality. But they don’t have that with Luka. He was kind of after Kobe. They don’t have a reason not to embrace him like a Kobe or someone else who was a Laker legend.”
The appeal of Kessler, 25, beyond being on the same career timeline as Doncic and the 28-year-old Austin Reaves, is his skill set, which should allow Redick to employ a base defense he is more comfortable with. "We have the guys that can pick up full court and guard and be disruptive and then we have Walker back there," Redick said of this year's team, which also includes Sexton, Ziaire Williams and Matisse Thybulle. The Lakers switched 40.6% of the time against on-ball screens in the last two seasons under Redick, the highest rate in the league over that time, according to GeniusIQ.
