Lakers' Austin Reaves goes from undrafted to NBA top-50 | Berry Tramel’s ScissorTales

Four years later, Reaves is in the top 60. As in, top 60 players in the entire NBA.

The Ringer, Bill Simmons’ sports and pop culture website that is particularly adept at NBA analysis, consistently ranks the league’s best players. In its latest list, Reaves is 44th.

No one saw it coming, this rise of a gangly sharpshooter from Newark, Arkansas, by way of Wichita State and OU, to exalted status. Running buddy of LeBron James and Luka Doncic on a rejuvenated Laker team that suddenly is an NBA championship contender.

Reaves signed a two-way G-League contract with the Lakers as a rookie but soon was bumped to a minimum contract worth $925,000 a year. In 2023, Reaves signed a four-year, $54-million deal. For a player who missed out even on the name/image/likeness explosion in college, Reaves must be pinching himself every day he wakes up amid the LA sunshine.

“Uh, not really,” Reaves said. “Kind of just try to live in the moment. Have fun with it.

“I’m sure after this season, there’ll be a time when everything kind of slows down and you kind of realize what you’ve done over the past four years and hopefully continue to do the same thing with a great group of guys.”

The Friday ScissorTales salute a college football rule change, make some NBA predictions and answer a question about Tennessee’s vacant quarterback situation. But we start with Austin Reaves, who must now be referred to as a Laker star.

Reaves is becoming an NBA lightning rod. One of the reasons the Lakers are given a puncher’s chance as a 3-seed in the Western Conference playoffs. Reaves constantly is upheld as a symbol of Dallas Maverick foolishness, a player the Mavs should have demanded along with Anthony Davis in the Doncic trade.

You’re going to be stunned by Reaves’ numbers: 20.2 points a game, 5.8 assists, 37.7 % 3-point shooting, 34.9 minutes per game (21st in the NBA).

In OU’s final game before the pandemic, in March 2020, Sooner coach Lon Kruger turned Reaves loose to go one-on-one with whoever Texas Christian chose to guard him. The result was a 41-point performance by Reaves in a 78-76 victory.

That served notice that Reaves had a bit more bounce to his game than we originally detected. The next season, Reaves had 32 points at TCU, 28 at West Virginia, 25 at Kansas State. In the NCAA Tournament, the Sooners lost to top-seeded Gonzaga, but Reaves had 27 points on 11-of-17 shooting, against a lineup that included five future NBA players (Jalen Suggs, Corey Kispert, Drew Timme, Andrew Nembhard and Joel Ayayi).

The Lakers didn’t draft Reaves but signed him in free agency and quickly saw they had a steal. He played 23.2 minutes as a rookie and averaged 7.3 points a game as his teammates nicknamed him “Hillbilly Kobe.” The name is not so much mockery anymore, as Reaves’ minutes and scoring have risen every year.

“Yeah, try to hang my hat on playing the game the right way and doing the right things,” Reaves said. “Any time you have high IQ alongside ‘Bron and Luka, they’re going to put you in spots to be successful. I just kind of run around out there and try to do the right things, and they help me do what I need to do.”

Reaves loves the Los Angeles weather. He golfs when free from basketball and is a 1-handicap.

“Couldn’t do that in the winters here,” he said sitting in a Paycom Center locker room a couple of weeks ago when the Lakers came through OKC. “Couldn’t do that in the winters in Wichita. Not Arkansas, either. I like where I’m at.”

And the Lakers like where Reaves is at.

“Reaves heard all of your — but definitely not our — snickering about him being sold as a full-share member of the Lakers’ new ‘Big Three,’” wrote the Ringer’s Justin Verrier in ranking Reaves 44th. “The 26-year-old has been working his bangs off. Reaves has always been a just-OK athlete who crafted his way to space — grifting foul calls, utilizing sly hesitations, making quick decisions — but with the defense tilted toward Luka Doncic and LeBron James, he doesn’t have to work as hard to get downhill or get a jumper off. His defense may still be a problem … but for now, his scoring juice has given a 40-year-old LeBron and a not-quite-fully-healthy Luka the respite they need to conserve their superpowers for the postseason.”

The Lakers host Minnesota on Saturday in Game 1 of a Western Conference first-round series. They are considered a real threat to the high-riding Thunder. Austin Reaves, Hillbilly Kobe from Nowhere, Arkansas, is a big reason why.

NCAA seeks to stop fake injuries

In an NBA game, if a player falls to the court and clearly is injured, the game does not stop. The whistle does not blow.

That’s because coaches can’t be trusted.

Making teams play 4-on-5 isn’t all that sporting. But the competition committee long ago realized that coaches would take advantage of any nuance in the rule to find an advantage. Need to stop a fast break? Need to squelch momentum when the opponent is on a 10-0 run? A little break for a phantom ankle sprain would do the trick.

And now, college football has come to realize that not all coaches flood the gridiron with honor.

The NCAA announced Thursday that its Playing Rules Oversight Panel has approved changes to injury timeouts, starting with the 2025 season.

The new rule is simple. If medical personnel enter the field to evaluate an injured player after the ball is spotted by the officiating crew, that player’s team will be charged a timeout. If that team is out of timeouts, a five-yard penalty (delay of game) will be assessed.

And yes, this rule is necessary. Fake injuries have gone from comical, some straight out of Vaudeville, to maddening.

College football sat on this issue for too long. The NCAA even let conferences request that Steve Shaw, college football’s national coordinator of officiating, conduct video review of suspected fake injuries and pass on the information to the conference office.

In other words, any possible disciplinary action would be nonsensically delayed.

In the NCAA release, Shaw said a nine-minute video put together by the rules committee shows “an integrity issue in our game that needs to be addressed. When you watch that video, action is required.”

The sloths on the rules committee didn’t need a nine-minute video. Watch a few games on any given Saturday, and you see linebackers, several seconds after the previous play ended, fall like they’ve been shot in an Audie Murphy movie.

Frankly, the fake injuries brought a World Wrestling Federation feel to football. It was absurd and it needed to be stopped.

My suggestion always was to banish any injured player to the sideline until the next change of possession. But I like the timeout/penalty wrinkle. Heck, if the new rule doesn’t work well enough, do both.

A few other rule changes were approved:

• Starting with the third overtime, each team has just one timeout for the rest of the game, instead of one per overtime period.
• Referees no longer will use “confirmed” or “stands” on video review. The ref will have two options: “upheld” or “overturned.”
• The “T” signal from any player on a kick return team means the kick is not returnable and the play will be whistled dead when the ball is either caught or stops rolling.
• Enhanced emphasis on preventing defensive calls that simulate offensive cadence.
• When defenses commit a penalty with 12 players on the field, offenses will have the option of not just accepting the penalty, but returning the clock to the previous time, unless the 12th player was trying to run off the field.

But the targeting rule will not change. Still a 15-yard penalty, still a suspension for the rest of the half and the entirety of the next half, even if it’s the next game.

“The targeting rule has served us very well,” Shaw said. “We had the lowest number of disqualifications, 0.14 targeting fouls enforced per game this year. I know fans think there’s one in every game, but there’s just not, so we’re going in the right direction. There was no back-away from targeting at all.”

NBA predictions: Thunder sweep

The NBA playoffs arrive Saturday, some 12 hours after the NBA’s play-in tournament ends. The Thunder won’t know its first-round opponent until Friday night, with the Mavericks-Grizzlies winner in Memphis playing the Thunder at noon Sunday in Oklahoma City.

Here are my predictions for the first-round serieses:

Thunder vs. Mavericks/Grizzlies: Oklahoma City in 4. Doesn’t matter, Dallas or Memphis. The Thunder should roll. The Mavs’ size bothers the Thunder, but Dallas barely has a dribbler. Against OKC’s defense, that’s curtains.

Rockets vs. Warriors: Houston in 7. Everyone loves experience in the playoffs. But Houston has too much youth, in the form of boundless energy and springy legs, for the Golden State oldtimers.

Lakers vs. Timberwolves: Minnesota in 7. The T-Wolves match up well with the Lakers. Minnesota has Jaden McDaniels and Nickeil Alexander-Walker to guard LeBron James and Luka Doncic, respectively, and the Lakers have no real answer for Anthony Edwards.

Nuggets vs. Clippers: Los Angeles in 6. Denver has no depth and no coach. At least not a coach with more than three games experience.

Cavaliers vs. Hawks/Heat: Cleveland in 5. I’ll give Miami one win. If it’s Atlanta, it’s a four-game sweep.

Celtics vs. Magic: Boston in 5. Orlando plays enough defense that it might steal one game.

Knickerbockers vs. Pistons: New York in 6. The Knicks didn’t look great down the stretch, but this is new territory for Detroit.

Pacers vs. Bucks: Indiana in 7. Just when you thought the Thunder doesn’t get much respect, you stumble across Indiana. The Pacers made the Eastern Conference Finals last season yet still can’t get any love.

Mailbag: Replacing Nico

Tennessee lost quarterback Nico Iamaleava over a money dispute. Iamaleava wanted a raise from the $2.4 million he was getting from the Volunteers; now he might be headed to UCLA for less than that. Either way, Tennessee is scrambling.

Brian: “You got a QB you can send to Knoxville? Vols are in trouble!”

Berry: Probably can’t help you. Tulsa’s Kirk Francis probably hasn’t done enough yet to warrant Volunteer interest, OU backup Michael Hawkins probably isn’t an immediate upgrade over what the Volunteers have. And who knows what to think of OSU’s quarterback stable, though Mike Gundy is offering up a spring game Saturday for your convenience.

The two remaining scholarship Tennessee quarterbacks are Jake Merklinger, who has been on Rocky Top for a year and a half, and just-arrived freshman George MacIntyre.

Both were highly-recruited, and MacIntyre is the grandson of former Vanderbilt coach George MacIntyre and the nephew of Mike MacIntyre, the former Colorado, San Jose State and Florida International coach.

I assume Tennessee will shop the portal. I assume it won’t be in Oklahoma.

The List: Coaches turned announcers

ESPN announced Thursday that Lee Corso will retire from GameDay, the pregame show that has anchored the network’s autumn Saturday coverage for four decades. In honor of Corso, a former Indiana and Louisville head coach, here are the five greatest coaches-turned-announcers in college football history:

5. Bud Wilkinson: Wilkinson was ahead of his time with his coach’s show during his OU days, so he was quite ready to move into the ABC broadcast booth in the 1960s.

4. Rick Neuheisel: The only 21st-century broadcaster on this list. Neuheisel always was entertaining as a coach, and he was the same in the booth.

3. Duffy Daugherty: Daugherty joined the ABC booth in 1973 and his folksy charm was an immediate hit.

2. Ara Parseghian: Parseghian was neither folksy nor particularly humorous, and his Notre Dame ties turned off the masses, but he was sharp on football and had things to say.

1. Frank Broyles: The Arkansas athletic director was the best ever. A fabulous coach in the Ozarks, Broyles’ thick Georgia accent was part of the anthem of 1980s college football.