Яксэл Лэндэборг Голдэн Стэйт Уорриорс руу нэгдлээ

As he did on draft night, Golden State Warriors rookie Yaxel Lendeborg once again declared himself undeserving of this new station in life. He said it almost instinctively, as a way to convey his disbelief, the way people do when they’re trying to explain blessings too big to comprehend.

“We all don’t feel like we belong here,” he said. His grin confirmed his wonderment. “We just made it by the grace of God, so we’re all happy that we’re here.”

It’s a warm way to see the world, through the lens of gratitude. Genuine awe. Appreciation that alters perspective. This family never imagined they’d wind up 3,400 miles from their roots in the Dominican Republic, on a stage in San Francisco, experiencing something fantastical.

But deserve, as a concept, gets tricky. It means the outcome is just. It means this is a warranted result — his being selected No. 11 by one of the NBA’s glamour franchises, signing for $28 million over four years and getting a locker next to living legend Stephen Curry. This destination doesn’t match their journey. From where Lendeborg hails, dreams don’t stray too far from necessities. They certainly don’t expect the kind of abundance that overflows into future generations. Especially for the 23-year-old who remembers being an aimless teenager ready to quit.

But in a different sense, perhaps a purer one, who deserves it more? Lendeborg, the Big Ten Player of the Year, was named first-team All-American after leading Michigan to a national championship. And this came after he toiled at the JUCO level for three seasons before two seasons at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.

Hard work deserves success. Sacrifice deserves reward. Unrelenting belief deserves a harvest. Lendeborg has the game worthy of being here. The dedication and intangibles worthy of being here.

And if that doesn’t mean he deserves this, then certainly one who does is the one who brought it out of him. His mother. As much as anyone, Yissel Raposo definitely deserves this.

Want to understand Lendeborg and what he’s bringing to Golden State? It begins with the woman who poured everything she had into him.

“Just being able to be with her every step of the way,” Lendeborg explained. “From having one job to having three jobs to not having any job now. It just makes me feel very motivated, very happy, that I was there to experience all of that with her.”

His grind comes from his mother.

He watched it live. The 12-hour shifts at VoiceComm began near dawn. Warehouse work reaches the bone, leaving feet aching, backs stiffened and spirits weary. At 4 p.m., she commuted home with people who left work early to beat traffic, and she’d just worked overtime moving electronics through a cavernous depot.

“When I was there,” Lendeborg said, shaking his head as he remembered, “it was really 12-hour shifts. I’m like, ‘Man. This is hard labor.’ And she’s been doing this for, like, 12 years.”

This wasn’t her only job. She also drove for Uber. On weekends, she cleaned up churches for extra bread. Whatever it took to raise four children.

Of course, she learned that work ethic from her mother and father, who instilled their family principles back in Santo Domingo.

Work lured Raposo to the United States. A family friend connected her with a job in Ohio. She walked away from a pro volleyball career after graduating college because she became a mother. A work opportunity had her family move again, to New Jersey. Raposo, whose home includes her children and widowed mother, connects three generations of family members who know something about getting the job done.

“Every time something would happen, she would just get right back up on her feet,” said Yikary, the middle of Lendeborg’s three sisters, who helped her mother translate during interviews. “When it was us four and she had to work two jobs, she did that. We got fed. We had a home.”

His belief comes from his mother.

Parked outside a friend’s house, on some random street in the New Jersey township of Pennsauken, inside the family minivan, a 17-year-old Lendeborg experienced conviction.

Raposo drove over to end her son’s avoidance and rebellion, which in this case manifested in a video game binge. As he detailed in a February article in The Players’ Tribune, she created a memorable moment as her pain reached out for his heart. Their conversation drifted from his strained relationship with his father to the future he was throwing away. That’s when he saw her face. He stopped arguing long enough to witness her heart breaking through the windows of her eyes. The tears streaming down her cheeks weren’t about anger. But about a mother grieving the reality of a son so far from what she believed he could be.

He wrote that his mother saved him in that minivan. He realized she wasn’t crying over who he was, but who he wasn’t becoming. So that night, he borrowed her faith in him. He leaned into the future she saw and not the one he couldn’t.

Raposo already had a plan. He’d complete 10 community college courses in a year so he could graduate. Lendeborg didn’t negotiate. The teenager who had spent months doing the bare minimum found himself with a full workload. Every class felt like punishment. Every assignment landed like torture. But he completed all of it because she believed.

She would sign him up for a showcase without telling him. She lingered around the gym to make sure she knew the coaches and they knew her son. She sent emails. She made calls. She bridged the void between Lendeborg and the colleges who weren’t recruiting him. Eventually, she encouraged him to play at Arizona Western College. She didn’t present it as an option. She told him he was leaving in two weeks.

Eventually, he weaned off her belief and found his own. He played 78 games over three seasons, averaging 17.2 points and 13 rebounds in his final season. He earned a scholarship to UAB, and over two seasons, he averaged 15.8 points and 11 rebounds in 72 games, garnering first-team honors in the American Athletic Conference both seasons.

That’s five seasons of grinding. Of hope. Of gradual-but-genuine progress building the foundation on which he now stands. From the driveway to the first round.

“I feel like those moments especially are why I’ve become so just mentally strong and just strong overall,” he said. “I always am grateful in every room that I walk in, no matter the circumstances. I know it’s very tough to even get here, and in my situation I felt like I didn’t belong in some rooms … I feel like those low points definitely helped me out. I learned so much through those processes, as well, and I came out stronger than ever.”

His love of the game comes from his mother.

In 2002, Raposo was in the middle of the basketball season at American University of Puerto Rico when she learned she was pregnant. Lendeborg’s father, Okary, was also playing hoops at AUPR. Raposo, who also played volleyball in college, kept playing. She didn’t tell anyone. She was three months pregnant with her first-born child, going to work in the post.

“I was quiet about it because I was scared,” she said in an interview published by Hoops HQ in December 2025. “Somebody told me that if they (find out) I’m pregnant, they’re going to (send) me back to my country.”

She gave up sports eventually to take care of her family. But she’d made a name for herself in the Dominican Republic playing basketball and volleyball for the national team and professionally.

This recent run of attention, with her son getting drafted, reminds her of those days.

“Sometimes,” Raposo said as a smile broke across her face, “I feel like a celebrity.”

Her father, Antonio de Jesús, put her in sports as a kid because she was tall. She grew to well over six feet and earned a scholarship to play in college.

Raposo credits her father — whom she called “a sports dad” — for her sports success. She passed the competitive spirit to her son.

Lendeborg got some directly from the source, too. Before his grandfather died from a heart attack some 17 years ago, he pumped baseball in Yaxel’s veins. It was Lendeborg’s first love. The Warriors’ rookie has a sleeve tattoo dedicated to his maternal grandfather, the originator of the love of sport in his heart and a willingness to work in his DNA.

His mother kept that lineage alive. When he was at Michigan, she’d yell from the stands. And when it was time for him to turn it up a notch, to step on the gas, she had a special sound she’d make. One that cut through the cheers and murmuring of the crowd. Through the chatter and squeaking on court. And he could hear her.

“And I know he hear me,” she told The Athletic back in April.

Of course he did. It’s the voice that led him here. The voice that’s always been there. From the woman who built him into an NBA player. This is her dream as much as his. And not even the chemotherapy she’s undergoing for Stage 4 appendix cancer could keep her away.

What’s more deserving than that?