The New York Knicks have emerged as betting favorites to land Los Angeles Lakers star guard Austin Reaves via trade ahead of the 2025-26 season, per online sportsbook Bovada.
The Heat (+400), Clippers (+400) had joint shortest odds, followed by the Bucks (+500), Warriors (+500) and Celtics. Others such as the Thunder (+1000) and Raptors (+1200) were listed as teams with longshot odds to land “AR-15” from L..A.
The rumors of the Lakers potentially trading Reaves gathered steam after comments made by The Ringer’s Bill Simmons.
“When Reaves gets traded this summer — and he will get traded — the stuff they [Lakers] get back for him is gonna make it seem worse that they [Mavericks] didn’t get him in the trade,” Simmons said on The Bill Simmons Podcast.
Austin Reaves Flopped in NBA Playoffs
It’s a fair assessment to suggest that Reaves, who averaged career-highs across the board in the regular season, did not live up to the hype in the 2025 NBA playoffs.
In five games against the Minnesota Timberwolves, Reaves averaged 16.2 points, 5.4 rebounds and 3.6 assists at poor shooting splits of 41/31/85. In comparison, he averaged a career-high 20.2 points, 4.5 rebounds and 5.8 assists at decent shooting spits of 46/38/88 through 73 regular-season games.
Reaves’ tremendous regular-season production earned him the reputation as the NBA’s best third option,
“I like what the Lakers have. And you talk about a third option, you look around the NBA, he might be the best third option in the NBA in Austin Reaves,” veteran guard Patrick Beverley said on “The Pat Bev Podcast” in February 2025.
Reaves was the first to admit that he let his team down in the postseason.
“I really just don’t think we played good,” he told reporters.
“Give credit to Minnesota, they played a really good series, but I think it comes down to just us not being us. And obviously, I didn’t have the series that I wanted to have, so you can point the finger at me. I really don’t care, I wasn’t good enough to help us be successful and I wish I could’ve [done] more. But I didn’t, I struggled.”
Knicks’ Future Hangs in Balance
Reaves ended his season-ending presser by vowing to return an improved player.
“You live and you learn. I guarantee that I’ll get back to work this offseason and I’ll be better,” he stressed.
While adding Austin Reaves could be interesting for the Knicks, Tom Thibodeau and Co. have bigger fish to fry. On May 12, they will try to take a 3-1 series lead over the defending NBA champions, the Celtics, at Madison Square Garden.
If the Knicks were to make the Eastern Conference Finals, or even the Finals, for the first time since 2000, all the chatter of their offseason plans would go out the window. Many Knicks beat writers believe the team will run it back with the same roster if it were to make a deep playoff run over the next few weeks.
“We built for this [expletive], man. That’s all it is. We built for it,” Mikal Bridges said after making two game-winning plays for the Knicks in Game 1 and 2.
