Meet Pat Spencer, the NBA's most unlikely player who went from lacrosse legend to the League

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The Golden State Warriors have a new cult hero with a backstory that reads like fiction.

Pat Spencer is one of the most unlikely NBAers you’ll ever find and, not surprisingly, he’s making waves on social media.

Spencer sports a moustache that looks straight out of the 1970s (think Starsky and Hutch) and during Game 1 of Golden State’s playoff series against the Minnesota Timberwolves earlier this week, dropped a running hook shot off the glass, adding to his throwback feel.

Spencer sporting No. 61 on his jersey doesn’t help much to make him appear like a modern player, either.

When the play started making the rounds on social media, some wondered whether Spencer was a real player or if AI had simply improved to the point where created players out of video games could be inserted into NBA clips.

Spencer is in fact real, though how he got here seems out of a movie.

He was only a few months shy of his 28th birthday when he made his NBA debut last season. That doesn’t happen very often. He played six games for the Warriors and a total of 26 minutes, taking only four shots.

In 2024-25, Spencer got into 39 regular-season games for Golden State (and threw down a huge dunk over gigantic Utah centre Walker Kessler), but now surprisingly has been called on by head coach Steve Kerr for five playoff contests.

A bigger surprise has been Spencer shooting 15-for-21 (71.4%) in those games considering he has hit only 41% of his regular-season attempts.

One of the most staggering parts of Spencer’s story is the fact that basketball isn’t even his best sport. Spencer hails from North Wales, Penn., a suburb just north of Philadelphia, and went to prep school in Maryland where he was a lacrosse sensation (while also playing basketball).

He was an All-American lacrosse player before going to Loyola, where he helped lead the school to a 49-19 record and a Final Four trip.

Spencer is the NCAA’s all-time lacrosse leader in assists (231) and the Patriot League’s career points leader. He has won all kinds of awards, including national player of the year and the Tewaaraton Award, which is considered the Heisman Trophy for lacrosse.

Not bad for a guy who was cut from his varsity lacrosse team as a high school sophomore.

Spencer was the first-overall pick in the 2019 Premier Lacrosse League collegiate draft, but decided to pursue basketball and used his college graduate-year eligibility to play at Northwestern University even though he hadn’t played high-level hoops since high school.

While productive there (averaging 10.4 points, 4.1 rebounds and 3.9 assists per game), few would have expected to see Spencer in the NBA one day. But he played pro in Hamburg, Germany, and in Oct. 2021 was given a chance by the Capital City Go-Go, the NBA G League team of the Washington Wizards, earning a spot after a tryout.

Spencer’s stats (5.7 points per game in 13.6 minutes) didn’t pop with Capital City, but he shot 39% on three-point attempts and intrigued the Warriors franchise enough that they traded for his rights.

He would go on to play a handful of games for the G League’s Santa Cruz Warriors in 2022-23, 43 more the next year (along with his call-up to the NBA) and six this year when he wasn’t up with the Warriors.

To get to the point where he’s playing in games in the second round of the NBA playoffs (which will likely continue with superstar point guard Stephen Curry out short-term due to an injury), Spencer had to make a G League team via a tryout, battle through some injuries, sign an Exhibit 10 deal with the Warriors, turn that into a two-way deal and then an NBA contract late this season (Toronto’s Jamison Battle charted a similar path with the Raptors this year, but he’s five years younger than Spencer and was still considered an older rookie).

It’s a remarkable story, one that in the old days would have been made into a movie.