Not long ago, Pat Spencer was driving himself to NBA G League games in a 2011 Honda CRV. He was a 25-year-old graduate student who had never played a minute of college basketball, a lacrosse legend voluntarily stepping off the highest pedestal his sport could offer to start over, from the very bottom, in a completely different one. Most people thought he was throwing his career away. Spencer wasn’t most people.
Today, Spencer is a guard for the Golden State Warriors, the same franchise that has employed Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green. In early December 2025, with injuries thinning the Warriors’ rotation, Spencer made his first career NBA start and dropped 19 points and seven assists in a win over the Cleveland Cavaliers. By February 2026, his two-way contract had been converted into a standard NBA deal, the kind of security he had been chasing across two continents and three sports for the better part of a decade.
Spencer grew up in Maryland in a household where competition was a native language. His father, Bruce, coached him in basketball from the time he could dribble. His mother, Donna, played in high school and attended every game she could. As a kid, Spencer was on as many as four or five teams at once, squeezing practices and games into every available hour.
“He’s always been that ferocious, ‘I want to win’ kind of kid,” his mother said. “When he was little, we tried to temper it. But I believe part of it’s just the nature of who he is.”
By high school, Spencer had narrowed his focus to lacrosse and basketball, but the path wasn’t smooth. As a 5-foot-4, 120-pound freshman at Boys’ Latin School in Baltimore, he was cut from both the varsity lacrosse and basketball teams. It was the kind of rejection that ends sporting dreams. For Spencer, it was fuel.
His former basketball coach, Cliff Rees, has had years to reflect on that decision. “Oh man, it was definitely the wrong call,” Rees admitted with a laugh. “The same thing happened to him in lacrosse that year, and me and the lacrosse coach have joked about it for years, like, we’re definitely the two biggest idiots to coach our sports.”
Spencer enrolled at Loyola University Maryland and chose lacrosse, reasoning that at 5-foot-4 and 120 pounds, college basketball recruitment wasn’t a realistic avenue. It turned out to be the right call. Before long, he had grown to 6-foot-2 and become one of the most electrifying attackmen the sport had ever seen. Over four seasons with the Greyhounds, he compiled 231 career assists, an NCAA Division I record that still stands, and 380 total career points, second all-time in history. He was a four-time All-American and four-time Patriot League Offensive Player of the Year.
In 2019, Spencer capped his career by winning the Tewaaraton Award, lacrosse’s equivalent of the Heisman Trophy, and was selected first overall in the inaugural Premier Lacrosse League collegiate draft. A professional lacrosse career, fame, and financial security were his for the taking. He turned it all down.
Using his remaining NCAA eligibility as a graduate student, Spencer transferred to Northwestern University for the 2019-20 season to play college basketball for the first time in his life. He had not played organized basketball competitively in four years. When reporters asked whether the career change was motivated by love or money, Spencer’s answer was instant: “Love.”
Spencer averaged 10.4 points, 4.1 rebounds, and 3.9 assists per game for the Wildcats, numbers that raised eyebrows, but not enough to earn him a spot in the 2020 NBA Draft. He knew why. “I didn’t shoot the ball well in college; had a lot of work to do on my jump shot; my body wasn’t where I wanted it to be,” Spencer reflected. “I don’t think there were too many people that were thinking I was going to the NBA. Deep down I knew that I could get to this level, but I don’t think there were too many believers outside of myself.”
When the 2020 Draft came and went without his name being called, Spencer didn’t retreat to lacrosse. He flew to Germany, signing with the Hamburg Towers of the Basketball Bundesliga to keep developing his game. From Hamburg, he moved to the NBA G League, first with the Capital City Go-Go, then eventually to the Santa Cruz Warriors. The grind was unglamorous: averaging 13 minutes per game, sharing hotel rooms, and driving his old CRV. But Spencer’s lacrosse background gave him a quiet edge. His court vision, honed by years of threading passes through tight defensive formations on the lacrosse field, translated directly to basketball.
“Many offensive fundamentals of lacrosse are intertwined with the basics of basketball,” Spencer explained. “Attackers utilize screen actions to create spacing. The sports even share similar vocabulary, pick and roll, drive and kick.”
In February 2024, nearly five years after walking away from a certain professional lacrosse career, Pat Spencer made his NBA debut with the Golden State Warriors. He was 27 years old. Curry, who had watched Spencer up close through summer workouts and G League assignments, offered a blunt assessment: “He’s a dog. Find me anybody else who’s got the self-confidence to do what he’s done.”
Spencer’s breakout came in December 2025. With Golden State shorthanded due to injuries, he was thrust into the starting lineup against Cleveland and delivered 19 points and seven assists in a Warriors win. Two months later, on February 7, 2026, his two-way contract was upgraded to a fully guaranteed standard NBA deal.
Now 29 and with a full NBA contract in hand, Spencer isn’t ready to reflect quite yet. “I stay in the moment,” he said. “Right now I’m just in the grind, enjoying the journey every single day. I’ll wait ’til I hang it up to do that.”
He still drives the 2011 Honda CRV.
