Austin Reaves has become one of the biggest success stories of the LeBron James era in Los Angeles, but things could not have started any more differently.
Long before the pair became teammates with the Lakers, Reaves was a devoted Kobe Bryant fan growing up, which naturally made him root against James.
Reaves admitted there was one old social media post that eventually came back to haunt him once he shared a locker room with the NBA’s all-time leading scorer.
“I just honestly was a Kobe guy, so… No, [the meme] was hilarious,” Reaves said in an interview with Pardon My Take. “When I need some sleep, I put my phone on LeBron mode, no rings. And it was a picture of Kobe like this. But no, I mean, I was a die-hard Kobe guy. So by default, I didn’t like Bron and it’s funny when that had came out we were in New Orleans. And after the game, we’d get in the locker room, Coach comes in, talks whatever and then I pull my phone up and it’s just text after text after text. And I pull up my Instagram and the first thing I see is ESPN posted it like a tweet of mine from when I was 12 and I was like, ‘Shit, what do I do?’ So, I just went over to him and I was like, ‘Yo, I’m not gonna lie to you, I used to be a hater.’ And I turned my phone around, he just started laughing.”
The awkward moment quickly turned into a joke between the two, and Reaves said it completely changed his opinion of James after getting to know him as a teammate.
“It’s crazy, it’s definitely crazy,” Reaves said. “The crazy thing was is everything that the outside world thinks of him as a person, you can’t really think he’s a bad player that’s impossible. He’s so good. I was completely wrong on, he’d been f—ing phenomenal from Day One. I was on a two-way [contract] and he treated me the same as he does today.”
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