SAN ANTONIO – Steph Curry in two exciting games against the San Antonio Spurs last season scored a total of 95 points in three days.
On Friday night, in their first game since Curry suffered a right oblique abdominal tear, the Warriors scored a combined 85 points in a 38-point loss to the Spurs at Frost Bank Center.
Life happens quickly without Wardell.
That kind of harsh reality was especially true for Warriors rookie Yaxel Lendeborg, who easily had the worst game of his NBA career thus far. Lendeborg made a career-low three points on 1-of-13 shooting and was minus-40 in 23 minutes.
“We just lost by about 100,” Lendeborg said from his locker. “I’m mentally fucked right now.”
Los Angeles Lakers star Luka Dončić wasn’t exactly Lendeborg’s welcome to the NBA moment. Playing without Curry against Victor Wembanyama and the defending Western Conference champions, who entered the night on a 10-game winning streak, was.
The match ended in the first minutes. San Antonio jumped out to an 18-0 lead, the most points the Warriors have ever allowed before scoring since the NBA’s play-by-play era began in the 1997-98 season.
As Lendeborg sat at his locker with a towel draped over his head, director of player development and assistant coach Everett Dayton did his best to console the young forward. The two work together individually, and it’s Dayton who guides Lendeborg through his pre-match routine. His message was one that the rest of the Warriors coaching staff and teammates are trying to convey to their prized rookie: It’s a long season, and games like these can only be good in the long run.
Lendeborg was not dismissive. He was just depressed as a competitive person to the core and very hard on himself.
“I’m not going to lie, I don’t even… I don’t have anything to learn, brother,” Lendeborg said in response to reporters. “We got beat. I don’t know what to learn, man. I was pissed the whole game, man. I couldn’t make a damn lay-up. A lay-up. I don’t really know… I don’t even know, man.”
A little more than eight hours before the announcement, Lendeborg, during the Warriors shootaround, said he had to “start thinking more like an alpha dog rather than a beta” with an injured Curry sidelined. Even he would say he played more like a gamma, an omega or as weak as such a loss could be.
But he wasn’t alone. No way. It was a bad night collectively and a reality check for everyone without Curry as Lendeborg took the blame.
“It seems like he put fear in all of our hearts,” Lendeborg said of Wembanyama. “Nobody wanted to get in the paint. Nobody wanted their shot blocked by him. We were all just making a bunch of weak floaters, and that wasn’t our game. I mean, I don’t know how many of us work on those, especially me. I shot seven, bro, in a row. I’ve never worked on a floater since like JUCO.”
When asked if it was even harder to score on Wembanyama than he thought before the match, Lendeborg continued to express his frustration with himself.
“He’s skinnier than me,” Lendeborg said. “I just have to put an elbow on his chest and jump into his body or something. If he blocks it, he blocks it. Otherwise, I can’t go in there scared, though. That’s pretty much what it was. I feel like we were all a little scared in a way, but we’ll get it next time, I guess.”
From the jump, Lendeborg physically and mentally felt like it wasn’t his night. He missed his first three shots, hit a nine-foot floater on his fourth try, then failed to connect on his final nine shots of the evening.
“First shot, in and out. I’m like, yeah, this is going to be a bad day. The next shot, I don’t even know what it was. I think I threw a floater, something like that. Man, once that ball hits the floater, it’s like, man, it’s over for the rest of the game. So I was pissed. I tried three more floaters. I made one, missed the others. I mean, I don’t know what the hell was going on with me, man, but I didn’t make the shot, I was 1 out of 13, so you know, it’s pretty much ass with everything.
“It was a horrible performance on my part. I let everyone on this team down. I don’t know what else I should do. Fk.”
Lendeborg entered Friday night averaging 21.7 points per game on 51.8 percent shooting. In his previous three games without Curry, he scored 26, 37 and 25 points. But two of those games came against the five-win Phoenix Suns and the three-win LA Clippers.
These two teams are not at the level of Spurs. Neither are the Warriors without Curry. At least not while trying to move on while he was gone 48 hours after seeing him hold his right side and later learning he was gone for the foreseeable future.
The most points Lendeborg lost last season for the national champion Michigan Wolverines was eight. The most he lost in his two seasons at UAB was 23. Losing 15 points more than that is a pain he says he can’t forget.
“They keep saying there’s about 70 games left, or 70 games left. I’ll never forget that,” Lendeborg said. “I don’t remember the last time I was outscored by 70. The whole match, no hope. I felt helpless, my God. So yeah, I don’t hear much of what they’re saying right now. I’m cooked right now.”
Since the Warriors selected Lendeborg 11th overall in the 2026 NBA Draft, he has adopted a refreshingly honest attitude. He also admitted that it was very difficult for him not to dwell on the bad things. It’s a lesson he’ll have to learn over the course of an 82-game season.
Friday night was only the 13th NBA game played by Lendeborg. He might feel like this loss is his fault, but that’s far from the truth. All five starters produced 11 points in the first half on a 14.8 percent completion rate. One game after scoring 22 points as Lendeborg’s running mate in Houston, Brandin Podziemski provided just eight points on 2-of-10 shooting in San Antonio.
Players like De’Anthony Melton, Al Horford, Gui Santos and Georges Niang have been virtually invisible in the last two games, resulting in two losses after an eight-game winning streak.
The Warriors have two days without a game before facing the Pelicans in New Orleans, whom they beat by 51 points last Monday night.
“One game, and we came across a hot team that played a great game,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. “So we’re moving quickly.”
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