play0:54Perk on Austin Reaves: ‘I saw greatness last night’Kendrick Perkins gives high praise to Austin Reaves after a hot start to the season.
play1:27SGA wows with career-high 55 as OKC outlasts Indiana in 2OTShai Gilgeous-Alexander shines once more for the Thunder, this time putting up a gargantuan 55 points against the Pacers.
Tim BontempsCloseTim BontempsESPN Senior WriterTim Bontemps is a senior NBA writer for ESPN.com who covers the league and what’s impacting it on and off the court, including trade deadline intel, expansion and his MVP Straw Polls. You can find Tim alongside Brian Windhorst and Tim MacMahon on The Hoop Collective podcast.Follow on XBrian WindhorstCloseBrian WindhorstESPN Senior WriterESPN.com NBA writer since 2010 Covered Cleveland Cavs for seven years Author of two booksFollow on XOct 31, 2025, 08:00 AM ET
Stephen A.: ‘I like Austin Reaves a lot. He can play’ (0:54)Stephen A. Smith heaps praise on Austin Reaves for stepping up for the Lakers after his game-winning shot vs. the Timberwolves. (0:54)
Perk on Austin Reaves: ‘I saw greatness last night’Kendrick Perkins gives high praise to Austin Reaves after a hot start to the season.
SGA wows with career-high 55 as OKC outlasts Indiana in 2OTShai Gilgeous-Alexander shines once more for the Thunder, this time putting up a gargantuan 55 points against the Pacers.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander shines once more for the Thunder, this time putting up a gargantuan 55 points against the Pacers.
The Heat’s new offense is sizzling. Can Miami do what Memphis couldn’t?
Milwaukee and L.A. are riding with more undrafted gems — but can the Lakers keep theirs?
Speaking of the Lakers, what’s next for the sale of their team?
The league is watching the early season scoring uptick
Making assumptions off a handful of NBA games is a fool’s errand. And yet, for some teams, the evaluation process for the 2025-26 season has already begun. Whether the small sample size theater of the opening 10 days will last until April remains to be seen.
But as league coaches, scouts and executives have begun crisscrossing the country to take in games, they’re reporting back.
As a result, early trends — including an offensive refresh in Miami, a new, albeit temporary, a No. 1 option in Lakerland and the league’s reaction to the scoring uptick — dominate our weekly trip around the NBA.
It sure does. Spoelstra and the Heat consulted with former Grizzlies assistant Noah LaRoche, sources told ESPN, before installing a more free-flowing, motion-based system that largely eliminates pick-and-rolls.
That has led to a stunning offensive start in South Beach. The Heat are running more than any team in the league, utilizing the fewest pick-and-rolls and having gone entire quarters without Spoelstra calling a play.
Bontemps: Last season, as the Grizzlies also got off to a hot start running this system, there was a common misconception that this was the offense that Tuomas Iisalo had brought over to the United States after working as a head coach for several years in Germany and France.
Those philosophical differences played out behind the scenes for most of last season, leading to the Grizzlies firing coach Taylor Jenkins, along with LaRoche, with nine games left in the regular campaign and turning the team over to Iisalo.
It’s a far different situation in Miami, where the roster is optimized to take advantage of an egalitarian system like this. And Spoelstra, who arguably has more job security than any coach in the league, has the freedom to experiment.
“I love it,” a scout said of the new offense. “It’s so different than everybody else. You don’t need to have a point guard, you need ballhandling wings. It’s nonstop, and it’s refreshing to see. It vibes with Miami’s principles, which is to play hard on defense and push the tempo.”
Windhorst: It’s too early to declare anything a success, but the Heat have seemed to unlock forward Jaime Jaquez Jr., who had a poor second season last year but is thriving as a multi-positional offensive weapon.
It has been a little tougher for Bam Adebayo, who has had a lot of success as a roll man and in dribble handoff action during his career, plays that have gone away. Adebayo shot less than 30% from the field in the preseason and struggled finding his shot early in the regular season. But he’s been outwardly very supportive of the new model.
“They didn’t really have that in Memphis. We’ll see how it all works when [Tyler] Herro comes back [from a foot injury].”
Perk on Austin Reaves: ‘I saw greatness last night’
Kendrick Perkins gives high praise to Austin Reaves after a hot start to the season.
Windhorst: Earlier this month, the Bucks released Chris Livingston and Tyler Smith, their second-round picks in 2023 and 2024, respectively, and it sealed a dubious streak. With the deadline for extending players on rookie contracts passing last week, the Bucks have now gone 11 consecutive draft classes without signing a pick to a second contract. The last draft pick the Bucks extended was Giannis Antetokounmpo, who was picked in 2013.
There are caveats. The Bucks have traded a bevy of picks to acquire win-now players; last year for example, they traded 2024 first-rounder AJ Johnson as part of the package for Kyle Kuzma. Between 2018-19 and 2022-23, Milwaukee won nearly 70% of its games, which meant lots of lower picks. But this unfortunate dry spell is a big reason the Bucks have struggled to replenish their roster around their two-time MVP.
Bontemps: The irony of those draft struggles is that the Bucks have had some massive wins landing players as undrafted free agents or as reclamation projects over the past few years.
The current starting backcourt, AJ Green and Ryan Rollins, is a perfect example. Green was undrafted in 2022 after a stellar career as a sharpshooting guard at Northern Iowa and has continued to make shots in the NBA, hitting 42% of his 3-pointers over his first three seasons, a track record that he parlayed into a four-year, $45 million extension this summer and a full-time starting job.
“Green is a fine fifth starter,” an Eastern Conference scout, who praised Milwaukee for developing him into a key contributor, said.
Rollins, meanwhile, is a former second-round pick by the Warriors, who performed well in predraft analytics models coming out of Toledo and bounced from Golden State to the Washington Wizards before landing with the Bucks in February 2024.
He then showed enough promise to land a three-year, $12 million contract this summer. And he’s followed that up by stepping in as the Bucks’ starting point guard. In his last two games, Rollins scored 25 points (then a career-high) to beat the New York Knicks, only to put up 32 points to set a new career high, along with eight assists, in beating Golden State without Antetokounmpo Thursday night.
The scoring, though, is a bonus, as Rollins — a 6-foot-4 guard with a 6-9 wingspan — provides the kind of perimeter defense this Bucks team desperately needed and was expected to lack when the season started. “He’s a big guard who can defend, bring the ball up and be a spot-up shooter,” a Western Conference scout said.
Windhorst: The Lakers, meanwhile, have until midnight Friday to pick up next year’s contract option on 2024 first-rounder Dalton Knecht, which is in some doubt as the option is for $6.4 million and L.A. might be interested in cap space next summer. If the option isn’t picked up, the Lakers will likely stretch their streak of consecutive drafts without extending a first-round pick to 20 years. The last first-rounder the Lakers ended up extending was Andrew Bynum, selected in 2005.
The Lakers have won three titles in that span, so some of the traded firsts and draft misses require no apology. But the Lakers, like the Bucks, haven’t taken advantage of the lifeblood of player acquisition that the draft has become. After Bynum, the next draft pick the Lakers extended wasn’t until Jordan Clarkson (a second-rounder in 2014), who extended in 2016. Max Christie, a second-rounder in 2022, was extended last season before being traded in the deadline deal for Luka Doncic.
Bontemps: Much like Milwaukee, the Lakers have had some massive wins in the undrafted market. The first example was Alex Caruso, although the Lakers chose to let him leave as a free agent when they deemed his four-year, $37 million deal in 2021 to be an overpay. That’s one the Lakers would love to have back.
And, like the Bucks, they’ve also had some success in the rehabilitation market, specifically with forward Rui Hachimura. No, the Lakers didn’t draft him with the No. 9 pick in 2019, but they did acquire him in the final year of his rookie deal, and after a successful playoff run signed him to a three-year, $48 million pact that has turned into a very solid deal for a guy who has started for most of the past two seasons and to begin 2025-26.
The way the Caruso situation played out brings up an interesting question on a much grander (and more expensive) scale next summer: Could the same thing happen with Austin Reaves, who has a $14.9 million player option for next season and could become an unrestricted free agent?
Massive scoring games Sunday against the Sacramento Kings and Monday against the Portland Trail Blazers with Doncic and LeBron James sitting out is the kind of thing Reaves and his representation will be able to sell to teams next summer. Could that lead to him getting a number outside L.A.’s preferred price range as the Lakers build around Doncic?
“He’s always been a very good player, but now he’s in a role where he can have the ball and generate a lot of offense,” a West executive of Reaves. “Someone is going to pay him a lot of money next summer.”
The belief around the league is that $30 million per year is the absolute baseline for Reaves’ services. (There are currently 59 NBA players making at least that much.)
Another executive theorized that with Reaves being able to get as much as four years and roughly $180 million from another team in free agency, that a five-year deal for more total dollars could be a good compromise to get a deal done to keep Reaves in L.A.