{"id":1370,"date":"2025-07-17T21:10:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-17T21:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/1370\/"},"modified":"2025-07-17T21:10:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-17T21:10:08","slug":"legler-and-mares-have-high-praise-for-trail-blazers-yang-hansen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/1370\/","title":{"rendered":"Legler and Mares Have High Praise for Trail Blazers\u2019 Yang Hansen"},"content":{"rendered":"

The buzz around Portland Trail Blazers rookie Yang Hansen continues to grow. Tim Legler and Adam Mares raved about Yang on the ALL NBA Podcast<\/a> on Wednesday, praising his court awareness, maturity, ability to seek out contact, footwork, and speed of play.<\/p>\n

They first talked about the excitement surrounding Yang. <\/p>\n

Mares: <\/p>\n

The guy we\u2019re going to start with because I think he\u2019s the talk of summer league, not necessarily because he was the best player, but because he\u2019s kind of the most interesting, at least to me personally, and that is Portland\u2019s Hansen Yang. He averaged 11.7 points, four rebounds, 3.3 assists in his three games, as well as two blocks, by the way. But you got a chance to watch him. Let\u2019s talk about him. <\/p>\n

Legler:<\/p>\n

Yes. I had his very first game and let me tell you something, man. It was an event. It was an event. Even by Vegas standards, the biggest reaction that I saw in the entire time I was there, other than the first Cooper Flagg, Bronny James game, which was packed…<\/p>\n

Legler went on to explain how impressed he was with his distribution and leadership:<\/p>\n

This guy is, first of all, he\u2019s an elite passer. I mean, he absolutely understands where everybody is on the floor. He\u2019s very comfortable directing traffic, even though we were told there\u2019s somewhat of a language barrier still with him. I saw the guy catching the ball on these trails and he immediately catches it at the top of the key as a trailer and start pointing directions and telling guys to cut and move and waving guys through and then running over. It was almost like he was coaching the team on the floor. Imagine how impressive that is. I think he\u2019s, I believe he\u2019s 20 years old. 20 years old, Chinese player coming over here. His first taste of what this looks like and he was clearly the leader of this team and it was not even a question the very first trip up the floor. So, that\u2019s the first thing that jumps out. The guy\u2019s knowledge of the game, his passing ability, and just his spatial awareness of where everybody is was unbelievably impressive.<\/p>\n

How does Yang compare to other bigs at Summer League? Legler:<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a lot of [second-year] players that were first-round picks last year or second-round picks last year and a lot of those guys are bigs. And I\u2019m telling you, Yang did that, what we\u2019re talking about, on a higher level than any of those guys that I saw. So, for me, to have the confidence to be able to do that, right, because you\u2019re that sure that you know what\u2019s going on better maybe than other people, so you\u2019re going to point, direct, lead and they encouraged him to do it \u2014 I was just impressed by that.<\/p>\n

And more about his distribution and playmaking from Legler:<\/p>\n

But the first thing that\u2019s going to jump out early in his career is his ability to playmake, pass the ball, organize, and just make guys better because he is a willing distributor. He wants you to cut hard, and he\u2019s going to know you\u2019re open before you do because of the way he can read what the defense is about to do on any sort of screening action. So that\u2019s going to be immediately beneficial to the team.<\/p>\n

Legler and Mares spoke for 15 minutes on Yang, and while there are some concerns about his defense and his ability to run up and down the court, they are full of praise for the Blazers rookie. Give it a listen, it starts at 3:45<\/a>.\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The buzz around Portland Trail Blazers rookie Yang Hansen continues to grow. Tim Legler and Adam Mares raved…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1371,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[617,64,63,726,1905,1902,1906,580,585,1904,1899,579,1897,1898,1900,1628,85,1901,1907,1903],"class_list":["post-1370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basketball","tag-and","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-basketball","tag-blazer","tag-blazers","tag-edge","tag-for","tag-front-page","tag-hansen","tag-have","tag-high","tag-legler","tag-mares","tag-praise","tag-s","tag-sports","tag-trail","tag-trail-blazers-roster","tag-yang"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1370\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}