De’Aaron Fox is a better basketball player than Austin Reaves. We can get that part out of the way from the start. There is no real statistical argument otherwise. Even the most optimistic projections of Reaves’ increasingly bright future have to acknowledge that Fox has physical gifts that he simply does not. Nothing he can reasonably do will change the fact that Fox might be the fastest guard in the NBA and he is not. If you were building a team from scratch and had the option to take Fox or Reaves straight up with no strings attached, you’d take Fox and wouldn’t look back.
This is, of course, not how NBA roster building works. And that’s a big part of what informs this latest scoop from NBA insider Jake Fischer: Part of the reason that the Los Angeles Lakers are not a preferred destination for Fox on the trade market is that his agency, Klutch Sports, knows that the Lakers have “zero intention” of including Reaves in a deal. This would be somewhat surprising for most teams. For the Lakers, who prioritize star power above all else, it might qualify as a genuine stunner. But in the broader context of their roster situation, it actually makes quite a bit of sense.
Let’s start with the obvious. Reaves makes a hair below $13 million this season, and his salary for next year doesn’t even jump to $14 million. Fox is making just shy of $35 million. For a Reaves-Fox swap to even be legal, the Lakers would have to come up with another $22 million or so in matching salary, and it would have to be matching salary that the Sacramento Kings would actually want.
Jarred Vanderbilt, for instance, is probably too injury-prone to get traded in the near future. No team is going to want to commit three extra years of salary to a player who just missed nearly a year with a foot injury. Dorian Finney-Smith would probably appeal quite a bit to the Kings, but his salary can’t be aggregated before the trade deadline due to the CBA rule that mandates a 60-day period before a player can be aggregated in a second deal. The best-case salary-matching path for the Lakers would probably be Rui Hachimura and Gabe Vincent, flawed but useful rotation pieces. More likely, the Kings would push for ascending young guard Max Christie, who has become an indispensable perimeter defender for the Lakers. Any scenario here involves the Lakers sacrificing depth in addition to Reaves. Depth is not something they have to spare.
Neither are draft picks. As of right now, the Lakers have two tradable first-rounders that come in 2029 and 2031. When was the last time a player of Fox’s caliber got traded without a first-round pick involved? Even in a best-case scenario, one of those picks is likely gone in any sort of Fox-to-the-Lakers trade. More likely, it’s both.
Where would that leave the Lakers? With a three-headed monster of LeBron James, Anthony Davis and Fox … but not much else. While the situations are not fully analogous, the obvious comparison here would be to the 2021-22 team that added Russell Westbrook.
Fox is a much better 3-point shooter than Westbrook, but in eight career seasons, he’s only ranked above a league-average percentage twice. The rim pressure he generates would be very valuable. Head coach JJ Redick has spoken publicly about the issues not having such a driver creates. Maybe Fox’s ability to draw defenders into the paint could help the Lakers shoot better from deep, but he’s starting at a deficit there — not only because of the issues James has experienced with questionable shooters in the past, but also because Reaves has grown into pretty good one.
He leads the Lakers by making 2.5 3s per game, and for the past three seasons, he’s never been below 39% on wide-open triples. Those are the kinds of shots James is so good at creating. Fox takes mostly more difficult, self-created 3s, and there’s a lot of value to be mined out of those shots. But outside of an anomalous 2023-24 season, he’s been below 37% on wide-open looks every year. Again, we’re not talking about a Westbrook-level shooting drop here, but the Lakers already rank 28th in 3-point attempts per game and 19th in percentage. Any dip for them is going to be critical, especially if other dangerous shooters like Hachimura have to be included in the deal.
Would the creation upgrade be worth the shooting downgrade? Potentially, but the evidence points against it. Oftentimes the greatest benefit that comes from adding a second high-level creator is the assurance that your offense can score when its best ball-handler, in this case James, leaves the floor. But the Lakers already do just fine in that regard. Lineups featuring Reaves without James have scored 120 points per 100 possessions this season, according to Cleaning the Glass.
Lineups featuring both haven’t been quite as potent offensively, but most of their struggles have come on defense. Fox is better than Reaves on that end of the floor, but he is no stopper. The James-Reaves pairing has typically been quite effective in the past, scoring at a rate that would put them in the 71st percentile among all NBA lineups in terms of efficiency last season and the 89th a season prior. Theoretically, one would expect James to ramp up his scoring aggression in the higher-leverage games that await the Lakers down the stretch and in the postseason. That likely helps kick these lineups into gear. When you factor in Davis, who is scoring on unassisted shots more often than he has in any season since 2021 and averaging the most assists per possession of his Laker career, there just isn’t much of a reason to think the Lakers have a shot-creation issue.
Now, the Lakers will have a creation issue when James retires in the near future. A hypothetical Fox trade would probably be more of a vehicle for ensuring that Davis still has a running mate post-James than it would be a push for the 2025 championship, but again, think about the assets sacrificed. If one or both of the first-round picks are included, they’d have very little to trade with to build around a Fox-Davis core. With Davis making supermax money and Fox on a standard max, they’d have limited cap flexibility. Christie would hopefully be around on a relatively affordable deal. Dalton Knecht still has his rookie deal, and hopefully he would grow into a consistent sharpshooter and scoring option. Otherwise? We live in a world in which premium 3-and-D wings are going for close to max money and even good ones top $20 million annually. The Lakers would have to develop two-way role players. That’s no given.
As we’ve covered, Fox is a better player than Reaves, but such a deal just doesn’t make sense in the broader context of where the Lakers are as an organization. If Fox were, say, a top-10 player instead of a top-20 or a top-30 player, you’d throw caution to the wind and just try to grab the talent. No matter how attached the Lakers are to Reaves, they wouldn’t take him off of the table for Anthony Edwards or Luka Doncic. We know that because when they acquired Davis, they traded basically everyone that wasn’t nailed down. If Reaves were four years older, he would probably be a Pelican right now. Fox is a star. Edwards, Doncic and Davis are superstars.
The difference doesn’t mean all that much to a team like the Spurs, who have a young Victor Wembanyama and a nearly endless supply of assets to use to build the supporting cast. They can feel reasonably confident in their ability to land the right role players and put Fox in the best possible position to succeed. The Lakers, given the roster they’re starting with and the assets leftover, probably don’t.
That’s part of why having Reaves is so important to them. If Reaves and James are enough on the ball-handling front as it is, they can direct all of the resources they might have otherwise poured into the Fox upgrade into role players instead. If they believe they can compete for a title with Reaves and James, they can use those picks and those salaries to trade for players that make sense around them. Davis has very publicly lobbied for a center. Another 3-and-D wing is probably needed. A lower-end ball-handler to improve on the Vincent spot might help. For now, these are attainable targets.
And if the Lakers don’t think they have a path to the 2025 title? It makes more sense to hold onto their chips anyway. Maybe someone in that Doncic-Edwards tier is looking for a new home in two years. The Lakers would probably feel a bit foolish if they took their shot on Fox now instead of waiting for that player. Maybe Davis will decline enough in that span that the Lakers feel they need to rebuild in earnest and want to simply use their draft picks to, well, draft. Who knows. Maybe in a year it just makes sense to trade Davis and Reaves anyway.
Unless you’re a team that has stockpiled assets as aggressively as the Spurs or Thunder, you only get to make a Reaves-for-Fox-style trade once. Once you do it, you’re locked into that team, so you’d better feel pretty confident that group is capable of taking you to the promised land. In this case, such a trade probably wouldn’t. Fox makes plenty of sense for a handful of other teams. The Lakers just aren’t one of them.
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