The journey home is supposed to feel warm, familiar and forgiving. For Lakers guard Austin Reaves, it felt anything but during the team’s first two playoff games of the Western Conference semifinals.
The Lakers’ second-round matchup with the Thunder was supposed to be a full-circle moment for Reaves. Born and raised in Newark, Ark. — population 1,000 — Reaves played most of his college ball at nearby Norman, where he sharpened his game at the University of Oklahoma, just a 20-minute drive from OKC.
So for Games 1 and 2 of this series, Reaves had a plethora of friends, family and familiar faces make the drive from Arkansas or Norman to watch the kid they used to call “Hillbilly Kobe” back on the playoff stage.
But for Reaves, his homecoming did not get off to a good start. Game 1 was a collapse you could feel happening in real time. Reaves missed shots he normally buries in his sleep. By the end of the night, he scored eight points on 3-of-16 shooting, 0-for-5 from deep. His 18.8 FG% was the lowest in Lakers’ playoff history by a player with at least 15 attempts.
“I had a lot of people here,” Reaves said after the game. “When you don’t play well, it sucks.”
The weight of his historically bad performance lingered into Game 2, but it didn’t break him. Reaves has built a career on something he calls his “delusional confidence.” He’s had it since he was a kid, and it’s allowed him to believe in himself when nobody else does.
In Game 2, he used that delusional confidence to come out firing, dropping a playoff career-high 31 points. But even that bounce-back performance came with a cost. Reaves had five turnovers and several confrontations with officials that spilled into a postgame spat that went viral.
“He turned around and just yelled in my face … I just thought that was disrespectful,” a visibly frustrated Reaves said after the game. “We’re grown men. If I did that first, I would’ve gotten a tech.”
The game itself unraveled in a similar fashion. A five-point Lakers lead midway through the third quarter dissolved into a 22-4 Thunder run that was fueled by whistles and free throws. A historically awful officiating crew called 10 fouls on the Lakers, handing 14 free throws to the Thunder during a particularly bad stretch that saw them miss several obvious calls. Reaves found himself caught in the storm.
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When the dust settled, the first two games for Reaves and the Lakers were back-to-back 18-point losses and a 2-0 series deficit.. And a “homecoming” that never quite felt like home.
“Not really,” Reaves told The California Post when asked if Oklahoma still carries that meaning.
He hasn’t lived there since 2021. Life moved on. He’s been in Los Angeles for five years now, and in the offseason he returns home to Arkansas to stay with family and play golf. So Oklahoma, at this point, means something else to him entirely. Another stop on the NBA’s grueling 82-game schedule. A memory.
Now that the series has shifted to Hollywood, where the noise is different, the faces less familiar, but the expectations just as heavy. The Lakers need production if they want to extend this series.
They need Austin Reaves.