Yaxel Lendeborg played 29 minutes of NBA basketball on Wednesday, October 21, and walked out of Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles with 12 points, a technical foul and a feud with Luka Dončić. The Golden State Warriors rookie told reporters after the Lakers’ 127-105 win that he had “lost all respect” for the Lakers star, accusing him of “a lot of flopping, a lot of foul-baiting, a lot of praying to the ref, man.”
Dončić answered on the court first. With the second quarter ending, he banked in a shot from beyond half-court, took the Lakers into the break 66-52 with 23 points to his name, and pointed straight at the rookie who had been jawing at him for most of the period.
How the night escalated
- Second quarter: the pair trade words on several possessions while Lendeborg guards Dončić.
- 22.4 seconds before halftime: after Dončić misses a three over him, Lendeborg says something loud enough for the officials, and he is given the first technical of his career.
- Halftime buzzer: Dončić’s banked half-court heave drops, and he lets Lendeborg hear about it.
- Fourth quarter: Dončić sits the whole period with the game out of reach, finishing on 28 points, eight rebounds and seven assists in 30 minutes.
- Postgame: Lendeborg, Dončić, Draymond Green and Stephen Curry all weigh in.
The rookie’s case
Lendeborg, the 11th pick in June’s draft, did not hide what he said. “I was telling him he sucks,” he explained with a grin. “‘You can’t score on me.’ I said it the whole game. I said a couple of cuss words, obviously.” His complaint was less about any one whistle than about the running commentary to referees. “It’s about him complaining the entire game, and then you get the foul call, and congratulations, bro,” he said, adding that the old admiration he had for Dončić was now “Gone, man. Gone.”
He also tried to shrink the highlight. “His only bucket on me was a banker from half court,” Lendeborg said, before conceding the obvious: “He had 28 on us as a team.”
The rookie found backing in his own locker room. Green, a veteran of plenty of these exchanges, rejected the idea that a first-year player should stay quiet against a superstar. “Everybody’s gonna be like, ‘Oh man, he shouldn’t talk to Luka,'” Green said, before urging the opposite: “You talk until you can’t f—ing talk no more.” Curry was calmer but on the same side: “I know he’ll be able to back it up.”
Dončić’s case
Dončić framed the exchange as something he did not start. “I think everybody knows when somebody starts talking, you get a different me,” he said in a courtside interview after the final buzzer. In his postgame comments he also pointed to restraint. “He was talking crazy, but I wasn’t trying to talk back this season,” he said. “Not trying to get techs. For the first time, that was not a double tech, because I didn’t say nothing, so I’m working on it.”
That matters more than it sounds. Dončić was called for 16 technical fouls last season and sat out a game after going past the league’s single-season limit. Leaving the officials to penalize only Lendeborg handed the Lakers a free throw instead of costing them one. As for the shot: “I knew that was going in before I got it in my hands,” he said. “I work on those.”
What the numbers say about the foul-baiting charge
The box score gives each side something. Dončić made 7 of 18 shots, five of them threes, which accounts for 19 points; the remaining 9 of his 28 came from the free-throw line. That is roughly a third of his scoring at the stripe, a share that supports Lendeborg’s point that Dončić draws a lot of contact and lets referees know about it. Dončić’s defenders reply that drawing fouls is a skill, and that the whistles did not decide a 22-point game.
Lendeborg’s own sheet cuts the other way: four personal fouls, 5-of-11 shooting and a technical in a 22-point defeat. He arrived as the oldest first-round pick of the 2026 class at 23, a college champion with Michigan and the Summer League MVP, so the confidence is not new. The difference now is that the opponent was a six-time All-Star who had just led the league in scoring.
Supporters of the rookie argue that a rebuilding Warriors roster, missing Jimmy Butler, Kristaps Porziņģis, Moses Moody and Brandin Podziemski to injury, needs exactly this kind of edge. Critics counter that picking a fight with the opponent’s best player in game one, then losing by 22, mostly gave Dončić a stage.
The second act is already scheduled. The Lakers visit the Warriors in San Francisco on Friday, October 30.
Further reading
Image: Erik Drost, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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