Austin Reaves’ scorching start to this season has many Los Angeles Lakers fans raving about him and predicting big things for him in the immediate future. He scored a career-high 51 points on Sunday against the Sacramento Kings, dropped 41 points one night later, then tied a career high with 16 assists while nailing the game-winning shot on Wednesday versus the Minnesota Timberwolves.
He’s averaging 34.2 points on 52.5% field-goal shooting and 38.5% from 3-point range, 5.6 rebounds and 10 assists a game so far this season. Thanks to him, the Lakers are 3-2 despite LeBron James missing all five games due to sciatica and Luka Doncic missing their last three contests with a finger sprain and leg contusion.
Advertisement
Sports commentator Colin Cowherd isn’t immune to making hot takes, and on the Thursday episode of “The Herd w/ Colin Cowherd,” he wondered if Reaves’ play of late is making LeBron James expendable past this season.
Part of Cowherd’s argument is that Reaves needs the ball, and if he’s the third-best player on a team, he won’t have the ball in his hands much to create. James is in the final year of a contract that will pay him $52.6 million this season, and if he wants to stick around and if the Lakers want to keep him, it will be very expensive to keep that partnership going.
Factor in how expensive it would be to keep Reaves, who is expected to opt out of his contract and become a free agent at the end of the season, not to mention possible extensions for Deandre Ayton and others, and the math becomes very complicated.
Advertisement
But if Reaves is capable of consistently being in that 25-point-a-game range on a team with Doncic but not James, perhaps he could be capable of being the second-best player on a championship team.
This article originally appeared on LeBron Wire: Colin Cowherd implies that Austin Reaves could make LeBron expendable