Welcome on to a Monday afternoon edition of Dunkton Prime.

Thank you so much for subscribing.

Got so much exciting stuff that we're looking forward to bringing you.

And part of that, of course, will be a free agency.

And we are going to continue our look at the 2026 free agents.

Let us begin at the point guard position, Danny,

and 28-year-old Austin Reeves is the biggest name out there,

and his situation with the Lakers is a fascinating one,

as is their team situation.

And as is always a little bit tricky with these, this is, this is the player position

side of this, not the team side, but we get into it a little bit.

And so Reeves unrestricted for agent, but the Bull, or the Lakers have sufficient bird

rights that they can bring him back and they can wield.

His cap hold is lower, Austin Reeves' cap hold is lower than, because he has this plurruption, that his salary. So that means, or lower than his, lower than his salary will be, yes. Yes, his expected salary. And so one scenario, there are a bunch of different scenarios for the Lakers, is that they, let's say the two sides agree to terms, they could agree to those terms, then the Lakers do whatever it is with Capspace, that could be signing players, that could be an imbalance trade financially, whatever, and then you, and then you just, the sequence of events is that you just sign him after all of those other things. And so that gives you extra spending power

and typically a team that wields cap space with some very fun rare exceptions isn't going to go

into the tax anyway so that you have a lot of wiggle room between the cap and the tax. And so you

can give Reeves's raise. You could theoretically use the room exception and do a lot of the other things if you want to do that.

So the question for me isn't necessarily like, well, what would the Lakers do? It's, is there another team that's really going to threaten this?

Because the last time Austin Reeves hit for agency, it was restricted for agency. And I thought it was a big mistake by teams like the Spurs, incidentally, to not pursue Austin Reeves more aggressively than they did.

So just to remind people, I know longtime listeners know this, but the way that a cap hold works

is that when the player becomes a free agent, it's essentially a placeholder for what the

system thinks the guy is going to get paid.

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