This was Summer League, not the NBA Finals. But if you watched the fourth quarter of Warriors 94, Grizzlies 90 on Sunday night in Las Vegas and wrote it off as exhibition noise, you missed something real.
Golden State's No. 11 pick, Yaxel Lendeborg, took over a game his team was losing and wouldn't give it back. Memphis had built a 10-point cushion entering the fourth quarter, riding a nine-point third-quarter burst from Cam Boozer that included a triple to push the lead to 76-66. That kind of lead usually holds up in a sloppy exhibition final. This one didn't. Golden State outscored Memphis 28-14 in the fourth, and Lendeborg scored seven straight points late in that stretch, capped by a pull-up three that put the Warriors ahead for good at 89-87. He finished with 21 points and 10 rebounds and took home Championship Game MVP. Nobody hands you a Summer League title for padding stats quietly. You take it, the way he did.
This had juice, too. Lendeborg said afterward that he thinks about revenge against Boozer "every time I play him," a nod to Duke knocking his Michigan team out of the NCAA tournament back in February. That's a real athlete carrying a real chip into a game that only technically doesn't count. Give me that over a sleepy exhibition rematch any day.
Boozer had a strong night by most measures: 19 points, 8 boards, 4 assists in the loss, plus a summer-long line that should have Memphis genuinely excited. But he had two late looks to tie or win it, and neither fell. His own admission afterward stings the most: "I've got to find a way to assert myself more." It's still a real question for a rebuilding Memphis front office, now without Ja Morant and Jaren Jackson Jr., to answer before real minutes are on the line. Cedric Coward's 19 points and hot three-point shooting made for a nice undercard, but Boozer is where this franchise's future actually turns, and Sunday night he got outdueled in the moment that mattered.
Memphis shouldn't hang its head. Reaching the championship after this group was outside the playoff picture as recently as Thursday, before catching fire, is a real accomplishment. And the revenge script ran the other direction too: Memphis throttled Golden State in group play earlier in the tournament. But titles get remembered and runner-up finishes get filed away. Golden State leaves Vegas 5-1, with a Summer League championship that, by the historical framing going around, puts the franchise in rare company for repeat titles since the tournament started mattering. Exhibition or not, Lendeborg didn't just win an MVP trophy. He won an argument. He's the guy you build a rotation spot around, not just another name on a two-way contract.
