Pennsauken’s Yaxel Lendeborg won’t let an injury stop him from playing in Michigan’s title game

INDIANAPOLIS — There was a moment, as Yaxel Lendeborg was clenching his fists and biting his jersey, the pain radiating up his left leg, when he honestly and truly wondered if his improbable journey had ended one game too soon.

As he tried to compose himself Saturday night on the elevated court at Lucas Oil Stadium, he could not shake the thought: To make it all the way to the Final Four, within sight of a national championship, only to be suddenly derailed by something as simple as stepping on someone else’s foot.

“I definitely felt like I did all this for nothing, in the moment,” the Michigan star said later. “I definitely had to calm down for a moment, speak to myself, get out of my thoughts.”

In the same way that Lendeborg’s journey from Pennsauken to the biggest stage in college basketball was anything but smooth, his path to the national title game was anything but a straight line. It started with two quick fouls Saturday night, sending him to the bench. When he returned, he stepped on the foot of Arizona’s Motiejus Krivas and injured his left ankle and the medial collateral ligament in that knee, sending him to the locker room.

» READ MORE: Yaxel Lendeborg played one season of varsity at Pennsauken. Now he’s Michigan’s star forward.

Then he started the second half and hit two quick three-pointers, one from either wing, to extend a giant lead on the Wildcats and send the top-seeded Wolverines to the national title game Monday with a 91-73 win.

All that’s missing to complete an improbable college career, one that included a detour to junior college in the desert before becoming the Big Ten player of the year and a first-team all-American, is one more win to make him a national champion. There’s no way, Lendeborg said late Saturday night, his knee wrapped in a giant bandage, he will miss that chance. Every twist and turn has led up to this.

“Unless I wake up, and I get up and fall off my feet, I’m going to be in that game,” Lendeborg said.

That may have been what led Lendeborg, earlier this week, to take stock of how far he had come, how fast. What would he, now, at 23, tell the teenager who just picked up basketball but couldn’t make the grades to actually play in high school?

“I would say, honestly, just try to change your life around way quicker,” Lendeborg told The Inquirer. “We made it. We’ve been through a lot of trouble, a lot of stress to get here, but man, listen to Mom way earlier and focus on school.”

His story has been told and retold. He picked up the game at 15. He wasn’t eligible until his senior year at Pennsauken. He took a three-year, junior-college detour to Yuma, Ariz., where he lived on chicken tenders and paid attention to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in his life — although not until his second year at Arizona Western College.

That was, he says now, when he got serious about basketball, the turning point that changed his life. He wanted to be a part of March Madness. He personifies it, this spring, as much as anyone. He’s the best player and biggest star on what certainly appears to be the best team by far, with only Connecticut standing in the way on Monday. UConn defeated Illinois, 71-62, in the other semifinal.

“I feel like that’s where the dream started settling in,” Lendeborg said. “Like man, I want to get there one day, no matter how hard it is, no matter how long it takes, I want to be there. From that day on, I was following college basketball a lot more closely and I started studying the game a lot more. That led to me being here.”

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After two years at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Lendeborg was one of the most sought-after players in the transfer portal, turning down a reported $7 million offer from Kentucky to take less at Michigan. He left junior college as a power forward; he’ll leave Michigan as a versatile inside-outside threat, both shooter and creator, and a first-round NBA draft pick despite his age.

Lendeborg was especially dominant at the Midwest Regional as the Wolverines clinched their trip to the Final Four, scoring 50 points in the two games against Alabama and Tennessee. Saturday night, he scored 11 points in only 14 minutes.

“His selflessness allows him to play a back seat a little bit,” said Michigan teammate Roddy Gayle Jr. “But especially with guys not having the best nights, he felt like he needed to have a little more. That’s just key, having somebody so unselfish but also having the ability to go out there and take over a game.”

The ability to surface that aggression goes hand in hand with the exuberance that has emerged publicly during his one year at Michigan. After Lendeborg committed last spring, he recorded a TikTok video that stoked the rivalry with Purdue in somewhat indelicate language.

The silly live TikToks with freshman teammate Trey McKenney have continued — “He’s just really goofy, all the time,” McKenney said — but Michigan coach Dusty May has also helped him refine an approach to the game Lendeborg admits now was lacking.

“We’ve challenged Yax to think about how he’s perceived,” May said earlier this postseason. “You hate to be like that because he’s so authentic and he has such a big heart and you want that to shine. … We didn’t expect Yax to have the best practice habits because once he got here, he didn’t have them. But we also tried to pull every single day and just get him a little bit closer, and we didn’t judge him.”

Lendeborg was sitting next to May on the interview stage when the question was posed to May. He laughed this week when asked what was going through his mind at that moment.

“I thought he was going to expose me a little bit for how goofy I’ve been this whole year,” Lendeborg said. “I know he doesn’t have a problem with me because I’m still doing what I need to do on the court and still bringing as much energy as I can to the team, but man, he definitely has been helping me out with my professional approach toward basketball, helping me see the game a lot differently and realizing this could be a life for me. Not just something that’s going to be happening temporarily.”