How a month of questions turned Warriors’ Yaxel Lendeborg into a force

DENVER — Questions come in all shapes and sizes, via text, microphone and the voice of the Warriors’ Yaxel Lendeborg. He wants to know. He doesn’t stop. The questions reflect something growing in Golden State, the start of a new generation taking root.

How does Stephen Curry stay conditioned? How did Jimmy Butler master his rocker-step? How to gain the respect of veterans? Lendeborg goes everywhere to find answers, both inside and outside the organization. After Golden State’s blowout win over Denver on Monday night, the rookie even went straight to national television, using a postgame Peacock interview as an opportunity to him to interview Hall of Famers Carmelo Anthony, Tracy McGrady and Vince Carter.

“Do you have any advice, like, just for me in general, just trying to keep going and things I need to work on?” » Lendeborg asked through headphones. “Is there something you see that I don’t?” »

He texted a version of the same question to Curry and Draymond Green in early October, at the end of Golden State’s trip to Hawaii, coming away disappointed in himself. Lendeborg entered this match timidly. He came out with four points. He didn’t want to “spoil” the Curry-Green dynamic, as he put it. Their answers?

“They just gave me free rein,” Lendeborg said Monday, describing Curry and Green’s responses. “So they helped me. And from then on, I just vowed to be a little more aggressive every night.”

This version of Lendeborg on Monday night – bulldozing a point forward and unstoppable with the “strength of an ox,” as Steve Kerr put it after the game – was a whole new version of the Lendeborg in Hawaii, and even the Lendeborg in Phoenix on Saturday night. Through four games, he’s absorbing at a rate no rookie has ever shown in Kerr’s 13-year career leading the Warriors. It was enough on Monday to completely and utterly dominate the second half of a game against three-time league MVP Nikola Jokic and win a game with vaunted Nuggets veteran Aaron Gordon so completely that Gordon was ultimately ejected (for contesting an illegal screen on Denver teammate Christian Braun).

Gordon didn’t dance on any niceties, Lendeborg asked post-match.

“Yaxel has an opportunity to be special in this league, man,” Gordon, a 13-year NBA veteran, told the Chronicle. “It’s just all the tools, his size, his strength, he’s got the mentality. He’s really good, man. He’s ready. It’s cool to see Steve Kerr giving him some power. They’ve got a good one.”

The shocking reality was that no one among a perennial Western Conference contender could stop a 24-year-old rookie from playing his fourth NBA game. He chased Jokic’s header to the rim. He hit with Gordon to cause fouls. He came in on the weak side for dunks and created second-half perimeter looks for others that broke open a 134-114 win over the Nuggets.

And he did it all — 31 points, 12 of 13 on free throws, 12 rebounds, six assists — without getting his touch, finishing 1 of 8 from three and running his hands through his hair after several clatters off the rim.

“And,” Green smiled after the game, “he dominated.”

Ask around and Lendeborg has it all. All the tools, as Gordon himself said. He can shoot, with a willingness to make defenders step up off the dribble. He can dribble, with a nifty enough sack to get into the lane at will as a 6-foot-9 ball handler. He can guard the ball, which visibly frustrated Gordon on several occasions, who finished with seven points on 2-of-10 shooting.

But his most valuable tool right now? His curiosity. Lendeborg asks questions, a young man whose brain frequently produces words at a speed his mouth can barely keep up. And then he listens.

“It’s a skill set,” Curry told reporters after the game. “Having confidence knowing that you don’t know everything, but still going out and playing with confidence and not being afraid to make mistakes, that’s hard to do. Especially in this locker room, this franchise, which has the history that we do.”

Lendeborg notably listened to Kerr, a head coach who has taken his share of criticism in a fading dynasty for his inability to properly integrate with 2021 No. 7 pick Jonathan Kuminga. Over the past few weeks, Kerr’s media appearances have served as a sort of guide for Lendeborg, who is completely afraid to publicly challenge a rookie who has shown he is completely unafraid to publicly challenge anyone. Kerr said Lendeborg needs to be more aggressive, run the floor harder, stand up less on defense, throw himself into defenders less and improve significantly as a weakside defender, the latter of whom has drawn his share of backlash on social media for his sheer bluntness.

“His weak-side awareness, right now, is very bad,” Kerr said after Golden State’s loss to Phoenix on Saturday night. “With his size, he should be one of our best defenders at the rim. And right now he’s ignoring the weakside, and that’s an area he really needs to improve on.”

The implication is that Kerr would not address these flaws so directly if he felt that Lendeborg could not handle them. Two days later, Lendeborg sat in front of journalists criticizing se for his own weak side defense.

Lendeborg is now ultra-aggressive. He ran hard against Denver, grabbing four offensive rebounds. And was notably more engaged defensively. And he played with much more control on drives in the second half, a directive that flowed directly from Kerr’s halftime comments: He should take one more dribble before finishing.

“He’s definitely going to give me all the right tools,” Lendeborg said after the match of Kerr. “And there’s nothing for me to act arrogantly, negatively, towards him.”

Green, 36, gave Lendeborg all kinds of advice for 48 minutes in his first matches. He told the rookie against Memphis, as Green recalled, to blast him if he overloaded him with information. But Lendeborg believes, as he said after the match, that he “needs as much information as possible.”

The rookie is 24 years old, yes. It plays on innate feelings. He played 11 games of high school basketball as a senior at Pennsauken High in New Jersey and played only 6½ seasons of organized basketball at any level. He listened to 26-year-old guard Brandon Williams on Monday, when Williams told him his running lanes were generating open perimeter looks. He listened to Green, who told him to be calm, control the game and “win it for us,” as Lendeborg recalled. Lendeborg even tried to study Jokic mid-match, noting his technique on a foul he had committed.

And in the fourth quarter, up 17, Lendeborg spotted a pick-and-roll and froze Nuggets guard Jamal Murray with a right-left-right a jab-step that recalled only one move: Butler’s rocker-step, which Lendeborg previously told the Chronicle he was determined to learn.

“You tell him something and he comes back the next play and this happens,” Green said. “He applies it right away. So that’s, I mean, that’s special in itself.”

It means confidence. Curry, Green and the Warriors knew from the start of training camp that they would have to rely on a rookie forward. It’s a strange situation for what has been one of the most dominant franchises in NBA history. And yet Curry deferred to Lendeborg for large stretches of Monday night’s victory.

Kerr and the Warriors not only accept Lendeborg’s growing importance as an offensive closer, they embrace it.

“Basically, in all the critical moments of the game, we were putting the ball in his hands,” Kerr said Monday. “And for a rookie to be this advanced already is extremely rare. But it’s exciting because I think he’s going to improve a lot as well.”