After a promising rookie season, Los Angeles Lakers guard Austin Reaves emerged last season as a very good player, and now he has almost become a household name within the basketball world.
After a strong regular season in which he went from a bench player to a starter, he upped his game during the playoffs. His production was a big key in the revamped Lakers reaching the Western Conference Finals.
Buy Lakers TicketsIt’s rare for undrafted players in the NBA to become useful, let alone good players, but that is what Reaves has already accomplished. It has reminded head coach Darvin Ham of one of his former teammates: Ben Wallace, the big man on the early 2000s Detroit Pistons who was known for his prowess defensively and on the boards.
Ham even said that he sees Reaves as having a similar trajectory to that of the four-time Defensive Player of the Year.
Via ClutchPoints:
“The last player that I can think of that had that kind of ‘come-up’ was my brother Ben Wallace,” Darvin Ham admitted to ClutchPoints in an August exclusive interview. “Going from being undrafted to being a Hall-of-Famer, and I think Austin, with the type of person he is, the work he puts in, the way he cares about his teammates, the way he stays in the moment, I see his trajectory being very similar.”
Wallace went undrafted in 1996 out of a small school, and it wasn’t until the 2000-01 season, his first with Detroit, that he emerged. He and Ham both played on the Pistons team that won the 2004 NBA championship over the Lakers.
While Wallace will mainly be remembered for the big role he played on that squad, he is also known as the victim of one of Kobe Bryant’s most iconic and vicious poster dunks.
