NBA Summer Workout SZN: Yabu Edition
Pray for the East! Pray for the NBA! Look at Yabu go, dude is looking DIESEL. Our favorite Dancing Bear is looking in shape and ready to dominate, and I for one am having a hard time containing myself. Would I have maybe preferred a video of Yabu making a shit ton of threes in a row or even making a bunch of layups in a row? Sure, who wouldn’t, but a huge part of Yabu’s development is getting that big ass (no pun intended but intended) body into shape. Can’t have another Jared Sullinger on our hands (no offense) you know what I mean? Yabu is listed at 260 but I’m not sure how accurate that is. Maybe his ass is 260 alone and that’s what they mean. Anyway, I’ll be the first to admit I am at the front of the line on Team Yabu, but I assure you this differs from my love of other former Celtics end of bench guys like James Young. I think Yabu can actually play while having a valuable skillset, and the flashes we’ve seen from him so far in his early career are why I’m so excited about his future.
Look the bar isn’t set all that high to begin with. At the end of the day all I need from Yabu is like a good 15ish minutes, some solid defense, good rebounding, some threes, and a fuck ton of dabs. He’s played just 235 minutes in his NBA career, and if you look at his Per 36s of 12/8/2.5 with 1.8 3PM a night, you’d be silly to think Yabu can’t be a rotation player on this team. I’ll take his 105 Drtg, his ability to stretch the floor, and his 16% REB% every day of the week. My favorite part of Yabu is he’s clearly not shy about letting it fly, as he had a 60% 3PAr last year, which is pretty outrageous. Pick and pop this dude all the way to the title if you ask me.
But look, if we as fans want to get more Yabu in our basketball lives, he’s going to have to get in better shape. This is not debatable. When Yabu gets tired things go downhill rather quickly, so it’s great to see as a Celtics fan that he’s making the offseason commitment to working on his body. This looks like a guy that knows he has more minutes in his future and instead of maybe resting on his few bright spots last year is doing everything he can to not show up to camp fat and piss Danny and Brad off at the jump. That’s the type of work ethic I want to see out of my 22 year old project/franchise player. In a perfect world, this would be my second unit lineup:
Rozier/Smart/Morris/Yabu/Baynes
You have scoring with Rozier/Morris, you have defense with Smart/Baynes, and then you mix in Yabu as the ultimate wild card and I’m starting to think that maybe this group is like a 7 seed in the East as it stands today. Either way it’s great to see guys putting in the work considering the expectations of this team, and you know what they say, it all starts at the top. The guys see Yabu putting in work and everyone else then falls in line. Let’s fucking GO.