Last season, Austin Reaves was an undrafted rookie guard for the Los Angeles Lakers who showed significant promise in several facets of the game, but still had a great deal of work to do to become the player he was capable of being.
It looks like one year later he has gotten there.
Buy Lakers TicketsHe started the season looking much improved as an outside shooter, ball-handler and facilitator. As the schedule wore on, he posted bigger scoring numbers and finally earned a spot in the lineup in late March.
Often young players such as Reaves will struggle in their first postseason appearance. Instead, he shined brightly in his playoff debut on Sunday versus the Memphis Grizzlies.
He scored 23 points while shooting 8-of-13 overall and 3-of-5 from 3-point range. After the Lakers’ 128-112 win, LeBron James said the team trusts him to make things happen with the ball in his hands (at 0:49).
“We trust him with the ball in his hands early in the game and late in the game,” James said. “So we got something going in the fourth quarter, and after every stop or if we didn’t get a stop or whatever, I think Jaren Jackson went on like a 5-0 run by himself when we went up seven, we went back to AR and just put the ball in his hands, he was able to hit a pull-up two, able to hit a three when they kind of had a soft switch and then hit another pull-up two to put us up eight. So he closed the game for us offensively.”
Reaves had a great game overall, but he did much of his damage in the fourth quarter. He had 14 points while going 5-of-5 from the field in that frame.
With just over four minutes left and L.A. leading by two, he found Rui Hachimura for a 3-pointer and then scored nine straight points to give it a 120-112 advantage with 1:31 left, at which point the outcome was no longer in doubt. In fact, what Reaves did in that span even reminded some of what the late great Kobe Bryant did in crunch time on a regular basis.
This type of performance can only make Reaves better and more confident in the long run.
