INSIDE THE VISITING locker room of the Target Center in downtown Minneapolis, Lakers wing Austin Reaves had just been presented with his second game ball in four nights.
It was late in the evening on Oct. 29. A short time earlier, with seconds left in regulation, he had split a Wolves double-team at the top of the key and sunk a floater to steal the game for the Lakers.
With ice bags wrapped around both of his knees, and his feet submerged in an ice bath, Reaves looked up from his phone and turned to teammate Jarred Vanderbilt to present a simple, but perhaps illustrative, question.
«What day is it?» he asked.
No one could fault Reaves for losing his bearings. It had been a dream week in which he scored a career-high 51 points in a win in Sacramento; dropped 41 points in L.A. on the Portland Trail Blazers the next night; and then one-upped himself two days later with a 28-point, 16-assist masterpiece that was capped by the buzzer-beater.
It had been the best 96-hour stretch of the 27-year-old shooting guard's steadily ascending five-year NBA career. And it was a solo-starring act, with LeBron James and Luka Doncic sidelined with injuries.
With the Lakers' lofty 8-3 record fueled largely by Reaves, his star rise puts him in squarely in the middle of two major storylines:
1: Helping the Lakers win early and often enough that it convinces James that his best shot to win a final title remains in Los Angeles.
But ...
2: Playing so well that it might cost that same Lakers team nearly a quarter billion dollars to keep him.
Back inside the locker room, Reaves ignored what he estimated to be more than 500 unread text messages from folks responding to his string of feats. Amid a mix of exhaustion and fandom, he had posed the
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