Yaxel Lendeborg, Aday Mara and the preseason standouts worth believing

Every October a handful of players put up preseason lines that send managers to the waiver wire, and every November most of those players are back on it. Preseason minutes are played against second units and in games nobody is trying to win, and four or five of them are far too small a sample to tell a breakout from a hot week. This year's standouts were collected by Jed Katz in his preseason piece for NBA.com, updated on October 17, which measured them in Yahoo's High Score format: rookies Yaxel Lendeborg of Golden State and Aday Mara of Oklahoma City, Washington's Kyshawn George and Orlando's Tristan da Silva.

What a preseason line cannot tell you is how many minutes a player will get once the starters play full games, and that is the number our projections are built around. So for each of the four we set the preseason line beside the minutes and the rank we project, and the gap between the two is the measure of how much has to go right for the preseason to be real.

Every player in this story is on the fantasy basketball rankings and the 2026-27 projections, and the NBA depth charts show where each one stands in his team’s rotation tonight.