Golden State Warriors rookie Yaxel Lendeborg has been a revelation to open his NBA career. Through his first seven games, he's putting up historic numbers, and he somehow keeps one-upping himself. On Sunday, he played his best game yet: 37 points on 85% true shooting.
He made six of his 11 3-pointers and added six assists. He was outrageously good, as he has been all season, save for the Lakers game last Friday in which he was properly hazed by Luka Dončić. Other than that, it's been nothing but buckets for Lendeborg, who, given how easily all this has seemingly come for him, perhaps got a little ahead of himself by chasing the 40-point round number on Sunday with a couple of, shall we say, questionable shots at the end.
Steve Kerr saw it, and with 2:14 to play, he benched his rookie as the Clippers were starting to make a desperate run, cutting a 21-point Warriors lead to eight over a two-minute span during which Lendeborg missed three 3-pointers, two of which were total chuck jobs. "He would've had 40 if we had just kept playing [normally]," Kerr said after the game. "The NBA game these days can change like that.
Almost every night, there's a 25-point lead that is overcome. "The game changed when all the guys on the bench were yelling at Yax to get 40. He launched three kind of bad shots.
A lesson is, if you just keep playing, then you stay in rhythm, you stay in flow, the ball moves, and then the game becomes much easier. I think that's the lesson for him and for our team. "But everybody loves Yax.
Everybody wanted him to get 40. They were urging him to shoot from the bench, and It got us out of rhythm a little bit." As soon as Lendeborg went to the bench and the Warriors got back to business, De'Antony Melton, who was a stud all night, buried back-to-back 3s to put the game back on ice. It was a great night for the Warriors, who've won four straight after opening 0-3, and for Lendeborg, who continues to be a total open book who is more than willing to admit to his mistakes and vow not to repeat them, as he did after the Lakers debacle when he took full accountability for "wetting the bed." Yaxel Lendeborg was chasing 40 points late and it let the Clippers back into it briefly.
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