Portland Trail Blazers star Damian Lillard is liking what he\u2019s seen so far from rookie teammate Yang Hansen.<\/p>\n
After the grand event of Lillard\u2019s re-introductory press conference on Monday, Trail Blazers reporter Casey Holdahl<\/a> asked the NBA veteran about his first impressions of the 7-foot-1 center from China. Lillard spoke glowingly of his new teammate, particularly Yang\u2019s demeanor on the court:<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t know much about him before. One of my assistants in Milwaukee during my first year actually coached him I think in China, and he spoke highly of him as soon as they picked him. But I hadn\u2019t seen much, and then watching him during Summer League, I was like, this is a real player, especially with the way the league is now with a lot of these bigs that teams use as a hub to playmake and facilitate the offense at times.<\/p>\n And he\u2019s got some swag to him. He\u2019s got some stuff to him, and I think that\u2019s good for a rookie, especially somebody coming over that\u2019s not from the United States. … You can tell the way he plays and how he goes about it, he has some real confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n The Blazers selected Yang with the No. 16 pick in June\u2019s NBA Draft<\/a>. Yang, who recently turned 20, averaged 10.8 points, 5 rebounds, 3.8 assists and 2.3 blocks per game over four games in NBA Summer League<\/a> this July.<\/p>\n Between Yang\u2019s flashy, confident play in Las Vegas and Lillard\u2019s feel-good reunion with the Trail Blazers, it\u2019s been an exciting and unpredictable offseason in Rip City.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Portland Trail Blazers star Damian Lillard is liking what he\u2019s seen so far from rookie teammate Yang Hansen.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30666,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[571,4203,4199,25805,4204,424,4195,2850,19259,2105,15553,823,419,99,1974,4198,25806,4194],"class_list":["post-30665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-a","tag-blazer","tag-blazers","tag-damian","tag-edge","tag-front-page","tag-hansen","tag-is","tag-lillard","tag-on","tag-player","tag-real","tag-s","tag-sports","tag-this","tag-trail","tag-trail-blazers-roster","tag-yang"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}