One NBA team executive is expecting Los Angeles Lakers guard Austin Reaves to earn a significant raise on his next contract.<\/p>\n
“I think he will get $30 [million] plus,” the exec told ESPN’s Tim Bontemps<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bontemps added that the official was “echoing multiple front office sources who were asked about the next deal Reaves could command.”<\/p>\n The NBA insider reported the expectation for now is that the 27-year-old will stay with the Lakers. He can opt out next summer and will presumably choose that path when his player option is only worth $14.9 million<\/a>.<\/p>\n Still, Reaves’ future in purple and gold isn’t totally assured.<\/p>\n “This is a big season for him,” one assistant coach from a Western Conference team said said. “He’d better bring it in the playoffs, because he’s got to be good enough [to pair with Luka Don\u010di\u0107].”<\/p>\n The Lakers are still haunted somewhat by their decision to let Alex Caruso walk as a free agent in 2021. Caruso becoming the final piece of the Oklahoma City Thunder’s championship puzzle only renewed the conversations about what could’ve been if L.A. had been more aggressive<\/a> toward retaining him.<\/p>\n The 2024-25 campaign was almost a worst-case scenario in terms of gauging Reaves’ value to the Lakers.<\/p>\n During the regular season, he averaged career highs in points (20.2) and assists (5.8). In the first round against the Minnesota Timberwolves, though, he shot just 31.9 percent from three-point range, while Los Angeles had a minus-10.1 net rating with him on the court, per NBA.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Lakers would have an obvious void in their frontcourt if Reaves were to depart, but his performance in the 2025 postseason wasn’t what you want to see from a player potentially earning $30 million or more per year.<\/p>\n Maybe Reaves will make this easy for Los Angeles by putting together another strong year in 2025-26 and then carrying that over to the playoffs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One NBA team executive is expecting Los Angeles Lakers guard Austin Reaves to earn a significant raise on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":47983,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,85],"class_list":["post-47982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47982\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}