Austin Reaves has made another leap during the 2025-26 season, establishing himself as a bonafide star for the Los Angeles Lakers.
While Luka Doncic is the face of the franchise, Reaves has been the perfect running mate as he and the Slovenian superstar recently made history as a scoring tandem.
Unfortunately, both Doncic and Reaves had rough nights in the team’s loss to the Phoenix Suns. The Suns essentially ran the Lakers out of their own arena, resulting in one of the worst defeats of the young season.
After the loss, Reaves didn’t mince words when discussing L.A.’s performance.
“We played like shit. One of those games. We played bad, they played harder than us. That can’t happen,” Reaves said.
The guard also acknowledged that the Lakers can beat any team so long as they’re matching their intensity and energy.
“Nah. I mean, I think just to negate it, if we play as hard as the other team then we put ourselves in position to win.”
Turnovers were an issue for the entire team, with Reaves taking accountability for the five turnovers he committed.
“I mean, I dribbled the ball literally out of bounds one time,” he said. “I’ve done it before, I did it tonight, and at some point I’ll probably do it again. But I was bad in that aspect, so I gotta be better.”
While it’s never encouraging to see Los Angeles lose games like it did to Phoenix, Reaves believes the only solution is to forget it and move on to their next set of games.
“I think you more so just flush this one. Like I said, we just didn’t play good, we didn’t play hard enough,” Reaves said. “You know that and you don’t let it affect you going forward, but you remember kind of just what the feel, what the energy was like, and you do the opposite of that. Like you said, this is a tough three-game road stretch, Toronto is playing good, Boston is playing good, Philly is playing good. So we gotta go handle our business.”
As Reaves noted, sometimes the best course of action is to simply move on and focus on what you can. The Lakers have a tough road trip coming up, so Reaves and the group will need to be much sharper to avoid another embarrassing outing.
Deandre Ayton marvels at Austin Reaves’ scoring ability
Austin Reaves has become one of the best overall scorers in the league, and Deandre Ayton recently marveled at his scoring ability.
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