Kevin Yebo is, if you will, a street basketball player, you only really felt that when you stood in front of him on that Monday evening in BMW Park. The professional Yebo, covered in tattoos and 2.07 meters tall, smiled; his team, FC Bayern Munich, had just qualified for the cup finals in mid-February with an overwhelming 103:67 (56:35) win over Rasta Vechta. The Munich team, who will face Weißenfels in the semi-finals, took revenge for their narrow defeat eight days after losing the Bundesliga duel against Vechta. And Yebo had his share of success: 19 points, five rebounds, three assists, a hit rate of 89 percent from the field. “Today I realized I was on the good side,” he said.
With these stats, Yebo, 28, wasn’t even the most noticeable player in this cup quarter-final in front of 6,150 spectators. Carsen Edwards is hard to beat in this discipline once he gets going. The Bayern shooter scored 29 points in the first half alone, but he was mainly allowed to take a break for the rest of the game. With his performance, he even made Brandon Randolph’s performance pale; the top scorer scored 30 points for Vechta, without which Rasta would have experienced an even greater debacle. Edwards was then allowed to rest for the Euroleague home game on Thursday against Maccabi Tel Aviv because there were players who jumped into his gap, like Yebo: It was also his job “to give the players who play in the Euroleague a lot of minutes have, can also give breaks.”
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And so back to the street basketball player Yebo: One of his tattoos says “Sky”, and another says “Chaos”, and perhaps these two tattoos fit his life quite well. Because the son of a German and an Ivorian actually came from chaos before he found happiness. He spent three years of his youth in Bonn in a children’s home, away from his parents. There was little light, a lot of heaviness, only through a street worker did he find his way out of the vicious circle. The street worker encouraged him again and again To pick up a basketball and distract yourself with it. He was already 16 then.
“I wasn’t brought here for nothing and I’m slowly getting there.”
His path then took him from Sechtern via Leverkusen and Limburg to Ehingen, youth Bundesliga, regional league, tough school. He signed his first professional contract with the Hamburg Towers and his second with the Niners Chemnitz. There he finally blossomed and became one of the top scorers in the Bundesliga almost out of nowhere in the last two years. The Ivory Coast made him a national player, and Bayern also became aware of Yebo and signed him this summer. It also fits in with their plan to give German players more chances. They should be given more playing time in the national competition due to the restriction on foreigners on the field.
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However, Yebo had teething problems, “there were various factors that contributed to this. Those were personal and family factors that I don’t want to go into now,” he said on Monday evening after the Vechta game. But he knew one thing: “Everything takes time. And if you switch off your inner ego and listen to others, things get better. I wasn’t brought here for nothing and I’m slowly getting there.”
He sees his role as getting the fans and teammates excited when he comes onto the field, but that’s not all. “I’m there to work on defense and defend the point guards there. That’s something I’m doing very well at the moment.” So Yebo basically goes where it hurts – and he helped Bayern enormously against Vechta with that. Munich coach Gordon Herbert also praised Yebo on Monday evening after the cup win: “He plays with great energy and unorthodoxly, that gives us something we don’t have otherwise. And he’s very versatile defensively and a good passer.”
Yebo has probably internalized exactly this game. Back when he was 16 and began to escape the darkness of his youth.
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