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…
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