Austin Reaves recently shared his thoughts on the Los Angeles Lakers still being championship contenders in the NBA. Reaves addressed his sentiments during a press conference for the Filipino sports betting app Arena Plus. The rising star discussed how his team is still worthy contenders despite making a first-round exit in the 2024 NBA Playoffs.

Reaves told the media that he’s content with the Lakers’ current situation. He believes that his team has the appropriate pieces to contend for a title. Despite not making a deep playoff run last season, Reaves is satisfied with the way they performed in the postseason.

“I like where we’re at,” Reaves said. “I think that we have what we need to go compete for a championship. You look back at the Denver series last year, I forget the statistic, but I think we led for like 140 minutes to their like 38 minutes or something, and we get beat 4-1. Which you can’t really wrap your mind around, but it was just a couple sequences down the stretch that we didn’t execute and they executed. If we do, we’d beat them in that series and we’d go on and have an opportunity to play Minnesota. So I like where we’re at.”

Austin Reaves believes they could have beaten the Denver Nuggets last season

Back in the 2024 NBA Playoffs, the Los Angeles Lakers went up against the Denver Nuggets in the first round. It was a highly anticipated matchup between both teams. Prior to that series, they also went up against each other in the Western Conference Finals of the 2023 NBA Playoffs. This was the Lakers’ chance to redeem themselves after getting swept by the Nuggets. Unfortunately, the only narrative that changed was the purple and gold denied Denver from sweeping them two years in a row.

Nevertheless, Austin Reaves firmly believes that their matchup was close last season despite losing 4-1 in the series. This was due to how close the games were. Out of all five games, the biggest lead both teams had during their matches’ conclusions was 11 points. This happened twice in the series. The first one in Game 1 when the Nuggets beat the Lakers, then in Game 4 when LA beat Denver. Other than that, Games 2, 3, and 5 all concluded with a single-digit deficit.

As he mentioned in his recent press conference in the Philippines, Reaves believes that if the Lakers didn’t collapse during crunch time, the chances of them advancing to the second round were high. With that being said if LA somehow figures out how to improve on staying consistent all season long this coming campaign, then Austin’s theory on still being championship contenders can be put to the test.