From underdog story to homegrown hope: Yaxel Lendeborg's journey to Warriors originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
Eyes, attention and major expectations will be cast upon Yaxel Lendeborg throughout his rookie year.
Lendeborg, taken No. 11 in the 2026 NBA Draft, is the Warriors’ highest pick since selecting Jonathan Kuminga seventh overall in 2021, and the highest yet under general manager Mike Dunleavy. But Lendeborg is a much different prospect than Kuminga was, and he’s entering a vastly different situation than Kuminga stepped into.
When the Warriors picked Kuminga, they were gambling on an 18-year-old who produced inefficient stats in 13 games for the G League Ignite. Kuminga turns 24 on Oct. 6. Lendeborg, before ever playing an NBA regular-season game, turns 24 on Sept. 30, six days before Kuminga’s birthday.
There’s a trust in choosing Lendeborg to champion the next phase of the Warriors. He isn’t a teenager. He’s a man stepping into an adult world of basketball, surrounded by stars trying to hide their gray hairs and squeeze out their last ounces of glory.
Experience isn’t an issue for Lendeborg; it’s an advantage. He played 190 total games in college. The final 40 were a storybook season that ended with winning a national championship for the University of Michigan. The first 78 were at a junior college he had never heard of and never wanted to be at, until everything clicked wearing an Arizona Western College Matadors jersey.
“Oh man, it’s a crazy, crazy journey,” Lendeborg said in response to NBC Sports Bay Area after his California Classic debut at Chase Center with the Warriors in July.
It’s safe to say Lendeborg is the Warriors’ newest homegrown hope for a bright future. It’s just as safe to say he’s also their newest underdog story to know.
Winding up at Arizona Western wasn’t his decision; it was his mom’s. Lendeborg cried when his mom told him he was going to Arizona Western. He cried during his own going-away party, on the way to the airport and looking out the window. The future star of college basketball cried at the thought of a junior college 2,500 miles away from his hometown of Pennsauken, N.J.
A hidden gem landed in the laps of the Arizona Western coaching staff from a random text out of the blue. The coaches learned of Lendeborg through a friend of theirs, a man named Marc Hsu, who then was an assistant at DePaul, all because Lendeborg’s mother, Yissel Raposo, got him into a basketball camp near New York for Dominican kids that changed his life.
The size, strength, natural ability and pure potential of Lendeborg shone in the showcase. A friend of Hsu’s told him about Lendeborg, who was not academically eligible for NCAA schools, and then alerted the Arizona Western coaches about him.
“He just said, ‘Hey, we saw this guy, do you guys have scholarships available?’ This was November, we still needed a guy with size,” Kyle Isaacs, who was an assistant then and Lenedeborg’s head coach his last two seasons of junior college, says. “And we said, ‘Yeah, we do,’ and he actually came out here, and he had never really played any kind of structured or organized or in any accountability-type settings and scenarios.
“It was an interesting situation, and it took some time for him to get some adjustments to be able to figure it out. We’re super glad he was able to do that.”
Already inching toward his 6-foot-9 height but only about 195 pounds or so when he first arrived on campus, as opposed to the 230 he left and the 241 he weighed in at the NBA combine, Isaacs remembers Lendeborg inherently having really good hands and footwork. Athleticism would never be a problem. Individual skills were easy to see, even if they needed refinement.
Everything else was starting from the ground floor.
“Him understanding how to play organized basketball was definitely at the basement,” Isaacs said.
Lendeborg hasn’t been shy about who he was in high school. He wasn’t a five-star recruit but rather a no-star recruit. He wasn’t a recruit at all. The reigning Big Ten Player of the Year could barely call himself a basketball player in high school.
By entering a dual-enrollment program through Camden County College, Lendeborg got his grades good enough to play 11 games his senior year, the only of his varsity high school basketball career, and his team went 10-1. Lendeborg had three 20-point games for Pennsauken High School in that span, a 19-point game and an 18-point game.
And still, he was more serious about playing NBA2K, Madden and Call of Duty than the real game that punched his ticket to a new reality that always felt unimaginable.
As a self-proclaimed “goofball,” Lendeborg still loves 2K and video games, but now understands the order they belong in on his list of priorities. He’s lively on streams and does TikTok dances like any 23-year-old. When Lendeborg played against former Michigan teammates Morez Johnson Jr. and Aday Mara, he was honest in saying it was hard to lock in against them in the second half with the Warriors leading big in both games.
But immature isn’t how Isaacs would describe Lendeborg. The word doesn’t fit him today, and it wasn’t the perfect description years ago at Arizona Western.
“I think it was more of just, how do I say it … you know, he grew up in a single-parent home life, and his mom worked one, two, three jobs at a time. His base layer of understanding on the things that you have to do to be able to have success, not only on the basketball court, but in academics, just because his mom was trying to work her ass off and help her kids all the time – his recollection was I get done with class and I come home and I play Nintendo, which he has readily said on multiple different occasions,” Isaacs says. “So getting him to figure out and understand that no, you do your work first when you get home, all that stuff is secondary to the rest of the stuff.
“And he’s not the only one. Ninety percent of our guys don’t understand that no, you get your work done first, and then when that is done, then you have time for extracurricular activities.”
The version of Lendeborg that Michigan fans went wild for last year, and the one Warriors fans are already counting down the days of getting to see more of after his impressive summer league, is the one that would run the length of the floor to throw down a dunk in one sequence, swish a three the next and top it off with a steal on one side and a dime on the other.
That was the 2025-26 version of him. The 2020-21 version was the building blocks of his MyPlayer before a MyCareer could even start.
“My first game at Arizona Western, I don’t remember if I scored a point or not, man,” Lendeborg says.
He did. Two of them, as the record shows.
Lendeborg’s first year in college was shortened to 14 games because of COVID-19. His debut was against Snow College, where he wore No. 50 and served as the backup center in an 86-80 win, playing nine minutes off the bench. Lendeborg made his one 2-point attempt and missed his one 3-point attempt, while also having four rebounds – two offensive and two defensive – and one blocked shot.
It took one more game for Lendeborg to record his first double-double when he scored 12 points on a perfect 6-of-6 shooting and grabbed 11 rebounds – six being on offense – in 34 minutes off the bench during a 96-87 overtime win on the road against Central Arizona.
Rebounding was an instinct of Lendeborg’s that needed little coaching as the other parts of his game grew.
“We’ve had 7-footers who couldn’t spell rebound. It’s not part of them. Rebounding at all levels is this thing in the middle of your chest called heart. This thing in the middle of your skull called a brain,” Isaac says. “He understood it, he embraced it and he’s one of the best rebounders I’ve seen.”
In 14 games, four starts, Lendeborg averaged 6.1 points and a team-high 7.1 rebounds per game. He never again scored more than the 12 points he did in his second game that first year.
Lendeborg started four straight games after his double-double, but then returned to the bench the rest of the shortened season.
“It’s kind of like watching Bambi,” Isaacs jokes. “Bambi’s trying to stand up, just trying to figure out everything, the environment, and trying to understand their legs, and that was Yaxel in my opinion.”
By the end of his first season, Arizona Western coaches kept being more intrigued by what Lendeborg could become. They went 11-3 in those 14 games and lost in the conference championship. Lendeborg played 20 minutes in a 21-point loss to end the season, finishing one point shy of a double-double where he snagged 12 rebounds, including seven on the offensive glass.
A seed was planted and a rose cracked its way through concrete. No longer Bambi, Lendeborg was a lion in the junior college jungle his final two years. Lendeborg wasn’t knocking on the door anymore. He was who you came to see.
The first game of what now became his freshman year after COVID created numerous changes in collegiate grade classification and eligibility was exactly what was to come the rest of the season, and the next as well. Lendeborg opened his true breakout campaign with a 15-point, 12-rebound double-double that included six steals, five assists and three blocked shots.
He didn’t come off the bench the rest of the season, averaging 12.0 points and 11.0 rebounds per game. Lendeborg, two years removed from playing 11 games in high school, was named the Arizona Community College Athletic Conference’s Freshman of the Year and Player of the Year, making First Team All-ACCAC, First Team All-Region D1 and Third Team All-American.
Lendeborg’s recruitment took off after playing in a JUCO All-Star event following his award-winning freshman year. He landed on St. John’s, about a 100-mile drive from his hometown, and signed in November of 2022. At the end of March the next year, Lendeborg decommitted.
The decision came two weeks after his final season at Arizona Western ended, and a week after St. John’s signed Rick Pitino to a six-year deal as its new head coach.
A month after decommitting from St. John’s, Lendeborg joined his Arizona Western teammate, point guard Marquis Hargrove, and signed with UAB – the University of Alabama at Birmingham – where he blossomed into an NBA prospect for two seasons before his magical one year at Michigan.
On the court, before finding a new home, Lendeborg put on a show for his encore with Isaacs now as his head coach.
To end his junior college career, Lendeborg averaged a team-high 17.7 points and 11.4 rebounds per game. He was again First Team All-ACCAC and First Team All-Region. Lendeborg was honored as a Second Team All-American and the ACCAC’s Defensive Player of the Year.
But he didn’t win the conference’s Player of the Year after winning the award as a freshman.
Oscar Cluff did. The big man averaged 18.2 points per game for the conference champions that went 29-3 as a perfect 22-0 in league play. Cluff and Lindeborg ironically ended their long careers with one year in the Big Ten, with Cluff at Purdue and Lendeborg at Michigan.
Their first contest last season was a Purdue loss and a Michigan win. The second was a Purdue win for Cluff in the conference tournament’s championship game. It was the other way around their last year in junior college.
Arizona Western lost to Cluff’s Cochise College at home in overtime, 76-69, on Jan. 25. Lendeborg outscored Cluff 28 to 16, and he also had 18 rebounds compared to Cluff’s two. Arizona Western’s next game was four days later against Scottsdale Community College.
Another home game ended in a heartbreaking loss, losing by three in double overtime, but Lendeborg was somehow even better than a 28-point, 18-rebound double-double. He again scored a game-high 28 points. To accompany him was an outlandish 31 rebounds – 21 coming on defense and another 10 on offense.
“It was just, whoa, wow, that was awesome,” Isaacs says. “I mean, obviously it really sucked that we lost, but it was like, well, that was as dominating of an individual performance as I’ve ever seen.”
Yet those two games still don’t sit well with him, and not solely for the losses. Win or loss, Isaacs knew Lendeborg deserved recognition for his efforts. He nominated him nationally for NJCAA Player of the Week, confident that Lendeborg would win. Instead, he was let down by the results.
“You have to go back and you look at both those two games,” Isaacs says. “Yeah, they were straight domination, and it was frustrating that he didn’t even get NJCAA Player of the Week. That really just pissed me off.”
Revenge came for Lendeborg a little more than a month later, courtesy of leading Arizona Western to its first region championship since 2019 with a team-high 24 points. The win came over Cochise, ending their season in disappointment with only their third loss. Lendeborg outscored Cluff 24 to eight, and outrebounded him 14 to 10.
The next game was his final in junior college. Lendeborg and Arizona Western lost to Salt Lake Community College, 80-67, in the West District championship game.
Nearly 26 months after Lendeborg scored two points in his college debut, he scored 30 in his junior college finale. Lendeborg stamped his three crucial years at Arizona Western as the game’s leading scorer on 11-of-13 shooting and its leading rebounder, inhaling 14 boards, including nine on offense.
“It’s definitely been a long, long journey for me,” Lendeborg says. “But I’m very happy and proud of that journey. It really made me a lot tougher, mentally and physically. I wouldn’t have changed that journey for anything.”
The NBA was never a thought at Arizona Western, not for Isaacs or for Lendeborg.
That world was so far removed that the only focus was getting one percent better in the gym and in the classroom every day to create more opportunities, eventually bringing a reality that beat any kind of dream.
Underdog stories have come in all forms for the Warriors. Draymond Green was never supposed to be a defensive force on his way to the Hall of Fame. Klay Thompson, taken No. 11 like Lendeborg, turned himself into not just an all-time great shooter but one of basketball’s best two-way players to unlock the best of the Splash Brothers. Say what you want, but nobody had Steph Curry chiseling himself into basketball’s Mount Rushmore and forever changing the game.
Fan favorites like Juan Toscano-Anderson and Gary Payton II also have their own unique underdog stories.
So does Lendeborg, whose story, long before being the Warriors’ next homegrown hope, couldn’t be told without three unthinkable years in Yuma.