Yaxel Lendeborg and Morez Johnson Jr. walked into the Thomas & Mack Center on Thursday night as former college teammates who hadn’t shared a court since cutting down the nets in April. They left as the two best players on the floor in a Summer League game that actually meant something.
Johnson, the top-10 pick Dallas grabbed in June, dropped 27 points on 12-of-17 shooting. He added eight rebounds, three steals and two blocks. He looked every bit like a guy who justified the Mavericks moving up for him. But Lendeborg, who slid to the second round before Golden State snatched him up, was just as good. He put up 21 points, 10 rebounds and six assists on 8-of-13 shooting. The Warriors won 101-90.
That stat line from Lendeborg is the kind of thing that makes you wonder about how the draft actually works. Plenty of people around the Michigan program thought Lendeborg was the better NBA prospect. Then Johnson went top 10 — one of the bigger surprises of the first round — and Lendeborg waited until pick 38. You could hear the grumbling from fans and draft analysts who thought Dallas should’ve taken Lendeborg instead of Johnson, especially since Dusty May was coaching both of them in Ann Arbor.
But Johnson played with a defensive edge that’s hard to teach. Three steals and two blocks in a Summer League game isn’t nothing. He chased down loose balls, contested shots at the rim and generally made life hard for Golden State’s second-unit guys. That’s the part of his game that doesn’t always show up in the box score but matters when the real games start.
Lendeborg showed something too. He knocked down a corner three early in the game — his first points of Summer League — and it looked natural. Like he’d been doing it for years. That’s the kind of thing that makes you understand why Golden State took a flier on him. The Warriors need youth in the frontcourt, and they need shooters to space the floor for Steph Curry. A 6-foot-9 forward who can rebound, pass and hit threes fits that pretty cleanly.
There’s also the LeBron James chatter floating around the Warriors right now. Nothing concrete, but the noise is out there. Thursday night wasn’t about that though. It was about two kids from Michigan who spent last season winning a national championship together, then took their rivalry to Vegas for one night. Johnson got the points. Lendeborg got the win. Neither one backed down.
Leave a Comment