Warriors rookie Yaxel Lendeborg sure likes to speak his mind and he’s come out with some more interesting material.
Following the Warriors’ preseason win over the Lakers on Tuesday night where he had 17 points, nine rebounds and two assists in 21 minutes of action, Lendeborg claimed it’s easier to grab rebounds in the NBA compared to College.
“I feel like it’s a lot easier to grab rebounds here,” he said. “In college, the paint was always packed, and there’s always somebody like extra just coming out of nowhere to rebound. These guys, I feel like they’re more lazy to get the rebound. So I mean, I’m having like clear-shot rebounds by myself, and it’s crazy you know. So, I feel like I’m going to have a lot of rebounding games where I’m at 9-12 at that range, something like that… After the first game, I definitely said to myself like, yeah I should be around this range for rebounds every game just ‘cause how easy it was. But statistically, I do want to be in an efficient range. I think I said before, like 15-6-4, something like that. But I’m going to try to get to those numbers. But I don’t want it to be inefficient, like under 50, under 40, you know. I want to be in the range where it’s good shots and it’s not me trying to do too much.”
Now, let’s think about this for a minute.
Yaxel has played in exhibition and warmup games only and is yet to experience a real NBA game that actually counts for something.
Wait until he comes up against Nikola Jokic. We’ll see how lazy he is.
Yaxel is a very confident young man. Cleary. Let’s see if this holds up during the regular season.
He may want to wait until he’s got a few regular season games under his belt before making this type of claim though.