{"id":677652,"date":"2026-06-01T10:19:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T10:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/677652\/"},"modified":"2026-06-01T10:19:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T10:19:08","slug":"austin-reaves-a-bigger-priority-for-lakers-than-lebron-james","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/677652\/","title":{"rendered":"Austin Reaves a bigger priority for Lakers than LeBron James?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Los Angeles Lakers<\/a> have a pair of prominent free agents in LeBron James<\/a> and Austin Reaves<\/a>, and who they ultimately prioritize this summer may come as a surprise to some, as NBA reporter Jovan Buha elaborated upon on Friday. “There’s two big differences between LeBron and Reaves right now. One, LeBron is a short-term solution. Reaves is viewed by the franchise as a long-term cornerstone. So if it comes down to, would you rather pay Reaves $40 million for the next five years, or LeBron $40 million for one year, they’re going to prioritize the long-term contract here,” he noted (36:40 mark).<\/a> “Reaves is more of a priority for the Lakers than LeBron is. That’s just a fact. The second part of it is that Reaves is going to have a market. And LeBron\u2014maybe he wants to go to Chicago<\/a>, or Brooklyn<\/a>, I do not foresee that\u2014but the issue with LeBron is that all of the teams that are going to want LeBron are going to have somewhere between a vet minimum offer and a non-taxpayer mid-level exception offer. So LeBron can’t leverage the market against the Lakers the same way Reaves can. Reaves can go get a monster contract offer from Chicago or Brooklyn, and put pressure on the Lakers to be like, ‘They’re about to pay me $40 million annually. Maybe I’ll take a [hair less] than that, but you need to give me that fifth year, and it needs to be pretty close to $40 million.’ Lebron is not going to have the same leverage.”<\/p>\n

Bleacher Report<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Los Angeles Lakers have a pair of prominent free agents in LeBron James and Austin Reaves, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":625730,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[11654,7567,157,3013,1055,355,99],"class_list":["post-677652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-austin-reaves","tag-brooklyn","tag-chicago","tag-lebron-james","tag-los-angeles-lakers","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=677652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=677652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=677652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=677652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}