Austin Reaves says he isn’t worried about the Lakers failing to add any major pieces during the offseason.
“I like where we’re at,” Reaves told reporters in the Philippines during a promotional tour this week. “And I think that we have what we need to go compete for a championship.”
Reaves pointed to the Lakers leading the Denver Nuggets for much of their first-round playoff matchup as a source of his optimism. However, despite this surprising statistic, the Lakers lost the series in five games, which Reaves described as something he “can’t even really wrap your mind around.”
“But it was just a couple of sequences down the stretch that we didn’t execute,” he said. “They executed but if we [did], we beat them in that series and we go on and have an opportunity to play Minnesota. So I like where we’re at.”
During the same media session, Reaves also gave his thoughts on new Lakers coach JJ Redick.
“[Redick] is someone that’s a fierce competitor,” he said.
“He came up to us [at NBA Summer League in Vegas] and was like ‘I’ve been staring at a whiteboard for three hours trying to figure out like, how we’re going to do this stuff.’ So you can just tell the intensity that he has, the time that he’s going to put in.”
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