Former Lakers coach saw Austin Reaves' potential from day one

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Austin Reaves has taken another significant step forward this season, and it can probably now be said that he's playing at an All-Star level. He finished the regular season with averages of 20.2 points and 5.8 assists a game, and in his last 17 games, he put 24.9 points a game on 52.4% field-goal shooting and 42.4% 3-point shooting.

Even as a rookie, when he scored just 7.3 points a game, there were signs that perhaps he could be a pretty good player, but no one seemed to think he could become this good.

Well, maybe except one man. Phil Handy, a former Los Angeles Lakers assistant coach who specialized in player development, said on the "All The Smoke" podcast that he could see immense potential in Reaves even before the guard played his first NBA game, and it was because of one specific trait the undrafted player has.

“I saw that from day one,” Handy said. “Day one. Look, I told this story. The first time I met Austin he was playing for our Summer League team. He went undrafted, he was playing for our Summer League team and I had never met him but I saw clips of him playing in college. So people think that this is just now. If you go back and you watch a couple of his games at Oklahoma, he got some [expletive] with him. Back then, I was like, ‘Hold up, man.’ Just the chip on his shoulder.

“And so I saw it. I went to the Summer League game and he wasn’t shooting the ball. And it’s crazy if you asked Austin today. It was halftime, I walked over and say, ‘Hey man, come here.’ Never met him and I said, ‘You wanna make this team? You need to shoot the [expletive] ball. Like bro, you out here shoot the ball, man. You wanna make this team.’

“So that second half he played well, but when Summer League was over and I had a chance to get in the gym with him…right away I saw it. And it wasn’t so much his skill or his shotmaker it was just his inner belief. That kid had a superb chip on his shoulder.”

Natural talent is important, whether one is an athlete or makes a living some other way, but it isn't the most important thing. Plenty of people have succeeded wildly despite lacking talent because they made up for it with work ethic, desire and good old-fashioned chutzpah, and Reaves is a prime example.

His ironclad will has driven him to this point and allowed him to have a number of big scoring outbursts, especially when the Lakers have really needed them. This season, he reached the 30-point mark 10 times, including six times since the beginning of March. On Feb. 8 versus the Indiana Pacers and with LeBron James sitting out, he went into volcano mode and erupted for 45 points, which was a new career-high for him.

Perhaps a couple more performances similar to that are in store for him in this year's playoffs.

This article originally appeared on LeBron Wire: Former Lakers coach saw Austin Reaves' potential from day one

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