Austin Reaves Is Out for the Season and the Lakers Just Lost Their Only Reliable Shooter

Austin Reaves has a Grade 2 left oblique injury. He's done for the regular season. And with that, the Lakers just lost the one player on their roster who could consistently put the ball in the basket from outside of 15 feet.

Here's the number that matters: the Lakers shot 36.8% from three with Reaves on the floor this season. Without him, that number drops to 32.1%. That's the difference between a league-average shooting team and one of the worst in basketball.

Reaves was averaging 18.3 points on 47% shooting. He was the team's best perimeter defender. He was the only player LeBron trusted to run the offense during rest minutes. He was, by almost every metric, the Lakers' third most important player behind LeBron and AD. And now he's gone.

The timing is brutal. The Lakers are fighting for a play-in spot with nine games left. They needed every win they could get. Instead, they're going into the stretch run with a backcourt of D'Angelo Russell and whatever else they can scrape together.

LeBron is 41. AD has played most of the season. The roster was already thin. Now it's paper. The front office had all summer to add depth and shooting, and they didn't. Now their third-best player is injured and there's nobody on the bench who can replace what he did.

The Lakers' playoff odds just went from slim to almost nonexistent. And the worst part? Everyone saw this coming except the people running the team.