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The night the Lakers traded Anthony Davis to the Dallas Mavericks for Luka Doncic will be remembered as one of the wildest in recent NBA history.
For Austin Reaves, the news first came in the most unexpected way, through a group chat message from Davis himself.
“The first thing I looked at when I pulled my phone up, AD [Anthony Davis] said, ‘They traded me,’” Reaves recalled on The Old Man and The Three podcast. “And if anybody knows AD, I don’t know if you know AD very well, he jokes around a lot. So I literally laughed, and I put my phone down. My phone kept going off, and I was like, ‘What the hell?’ So I pulled up Instagram and I seen Sham’s tweet or post or whatever. I called Aaron and Reggie, and I was like, ‘What the f***?’ And they were like, ‘There’s no way this is real.’ And I was like, ‘All right, cool. Let me know if you hear anything else.’”
But the reality soon set in after a conversation with an assistant coach.
“I call one of our assistant coaches, Bo,” Reaves said. “And I was like, ‘What the f***?’ And he was like, ‘Uh.’ And that’s all he said. And I was like, ‘Uh, what?’ Like, he was like, ‘It’s real.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, how do you know that?’ And he was like, ‘I’m sitting by Max Christie.’”
Davis, along with Christie, was sent to Dallas in the February 2 blockbuster deal that shocked the league. Doncic went on to finish the season with the Lakers, but Los Angeles fell 4-1 in the opening round of the playoffs to Minnesota.
Reaves, meanwhile, enters a contract year with his value skyrocketing. League executives believe the 26-year-old could earn more than $35 million annually on his next deal, with some teams speculating his price could reach $40 million a year.
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