Pat Spencer recalled a time when the general public didn’t think he had any basketball skills, so he had to show them.
The Golden State guard recounted his early days of playing pickup basketball with his brother, Cam, and having to impress the other players to get on a team.
“It used to be tough to get [chosen] in that first pickup game,” Spencer said on “The Young Man and the Three” podcast. “You walk in and ask them if they got five [players] and they’d be like, ‘Yeah, we got five.’ And then you see them over there trying to pick somebody else up.
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SIGN UP HERE “So, I used to dunk right when I walked in the gym just to try to get picked up. And then, Cam’s four years younger, and he always had trouble getting picked up. So, I’d always dunk and they’d be like, “OK, we got him,’ and I’d be like, ‘Well, you have to take my brother too.’ So that was how we got on the court for a while.”
Spencer had an unlikely path to the Warriors, and at one point, he seemed destined to go pro in another sport. As a star lacrosse and basketball player in high school, he decided to solely focus on the former while in college at Loyola University.
After an accomplished career that saw him win the Tewaaraton Award for the most outstanding lacrosse player, Spencer used his final year of eligibility to play basketball at Northwestern University. After his 2020 season was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic, he signed with the Hamburg Towers, a pro basketball team out of Hamburg, Germany.
From there, Spencer found his way to the NBA G-League Santa Cruz Warriors before being called up to Golden State last February.
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The 28-year-old has seen his minutes rise steadily throughout the season, and the Warriors will need him to continue his meteoric rise with Steph Curry out of the Western Conference semifinals against the Minnesota Timberwolves for at least a week due to a left hamstring strain.