When Yaxel Lendeborg decided it would be a good idea to start a war of words with Luka Dončić during and after his first career NBA game, basically calling the Lakers superstar a flopping crybaby for whom he "lost all respect," both Stephen Curry and Steve Kerr had the same message for their brash rookie. 

"Now you've got to back it up." 

Friday night was Lendeborg's chance to do just that when the Warriors hosted Dončić and the Lakers for the start of the NBA Cup's group stage. It did not, to put it politely, go well for Lendeborg, who laid down the worst track of his young career with six points, one rebound, zero assists and five turnovers. 

Why Yaxel Lendeborg could be the key to saving what's left of the Warriors' Stephen Curry era

Brad Botkin

Lendeborg got into early foul trouble and was never a factor on either end. For a guy who has injected so much juice into what looked like an old, disinterested, almost lifeless Warriors team when it faced these same Lakers on opening night, Lendeborg was all but invisible in finishing as a game-low minus-20 in his 24 minutes before fouling out. 

Meanwhile, Dončić -- who was egging on the "Luka sucks!" chant coming from the Chase Center crowd early on -- poured in 21 first-quarter points en route to 37 for the game. He added seven rebounds, five assists, a pair of blocks and a steal for good measure. He outscored the entire Warriors team in the first quarter by himself as the Lakers raced out to a 25-point first-half lead. 

Certainly everything you've read so far would suggest the Lakers ran away with this game, but in today's NBA, a 20-point lead is just prologue for a second-half plot twist. And sure enough, the Warriors, behind eight 3-pointers and 31 points from Curry, stormed back to win going away, 112-95, for their third straight victory after opening the season 0-3. 

Lendeborg might not have been able to back up his Dončić talk (which, we have to point out, was nothing but the truth, even if you could argue he would've been better off keeping it to himself, at least this early in his career), but the greatest shooter to ever set foot on this planet had his back. This is how you go at Luka Dončić ...

And this ...

It wasn't just Curry -- who passed Dominique Wilkins for 18th on the NBA's all-time scoring list -- coming to Lendeborg's rescue. It was Brandin Podziemski with 21 points, six assists and five rebounds. It was De'Anthony Melton and Georges Niang tag-teaming for 27 points and seven 3-pointers. It was Draymond Green taking over the Dončić defensive duties and dishing out nine dimes. It was the Warriors' bench outscoring L.A.'s bench 50-7, and a defense that held the Lakers to just 57 points over the final three quarters to fuel an astounding 42-point turnaround. 

For Lendeborg, there's a lesson here that goes beyond not riling up a superstar and letting your play do the talking (which, I will restate, was fine; he's a grown man, and he didn't say anything that everyone else doesn't think), which is that it ultimately doesn't matter that Dončić got the better of him individually on Friday, because in the end it was the Warriors that got the better of the Lakers. 

This was the message that Kerr had for Lendeborg after the opener in which Lendeborg was all too proud of his individual defense on Dončić. 

"He did a good job on Luka one-on-one, but we got torched by Luka as a team," Kerr said. "All those stats that the NBA puts up, like, 'Hey, when he guarded him, who the eff cares?' It's like, they scored 127 on us. That stuff's all bulls---. It's our defense."

Translation: it's a team game. As his career progresses, Lendeborg, a clear alpha, is going to be the one picking up his teammates on plenty of nights, but on this night it was the rookie who needed his teammates to cover for him. Suffice it to say, they did that.