Pat Spencer still sticks out on the basketball court.
That was true six years ago when he put on a Northwestern jersey for the first time as a graduate transfer. And it was true again Sunday night, when the former Wildcat stepped onto the United Center court for the Golden State Warriors and peppered the Chicago Bulls with 12 points in a 123-91 blowout.
It’s not hard to define why Spencer draws the eye. He wears No. 61, like the kid who showed up late to his rec league and had to dig a jersey out of the back of the closet. He runs with a grounded explosivity, hardly disguising his past as the onetime greatest college lacrosse player in the country. His teammates watch him from the sidelines with barely contained glee, celebrating the fact that they’ll never — and they mean never — play alongside another guy quite like him.
By now, Spencer’s story is akin to a fable in the NBA. This is an athlete who walked away from the top of another sport to give competitive basketball another shot at age 22. A little more than six years later, he’s starting games in the NBA.
That’s not supposed to work. None of this is supposed to work. But here Spencer is anyway — bumping chests and stealing offensive rebounds off All-Stars, sinking dagger 3s and shouting “I’m that (expletive)” into the stands, daring anyone to tell him that anything is impossible.
“I’m a believer,” Spencer told the Tribune. “And if things get hard, I just rely on the work. A road block is just a road block. You’ve got to figure out a way around it.”
In late spring 2019, Northwestern coach Chris Collins received a phone call from longtime friend Jimmy Patsos.
Collins trusted Patsos — a coach for nearly four decades — with anything related to basketball. So he knew to take his friend seriously when he broke the ice bluntly: “Hey, don’t hang up on me. I want you to hear me out on this.”
There was this lacrosse star out of Loyola Maryland. He was the best the sport had to offer — four-time Patriot League offensive player of the year and winner of the Tewaaraton Award (the sport’s equivalent to the Heisman Trophy). He had just been drafted No. 1 in the Premier Lacrosse League. And he didn’t want to go.
Lacrosse didn’t offer a real future. The PLL was in its inaugural season in 2019, with average salaries below $40,000. The league was an exciting prospect for die-hard fans. For Spencer, it felt like a dead end.
There was more to it too. Spencer loved lacrosse. But he loved basketball more. He was a mainstay at the rec center gym on campus in Baltimore. The moment the lacrosse season ended, he signed himself up for local pro-am leagues.
As a preps prospect, Spencer pinned his NCAA dreams on lacrosse mostly because he didn’t crack 6 feet until his junior year of high school. But at 22, Spencer was thinking about the future. He had filled out to a 6-2 frame that could potentially keep up as a guard. And with one year of non-lacrosse eligibility remaining, he was seeking a new home to test himself as a basketball player — preferably a Power 5 program that could prepare him for the pros.
“He just needs a school,” Patsos told Collins. “He just needs someone to give him a chance.”
The timing was right. Collins had a scholarship to give. After six years with the Wildcats, he was in the first year of a rebuild around freshmen and sophomores. His locker room craved leadership more than anything else.
Collins did not watch a single minute of film before inviting Spencer to Evanston — or before offering him a scholarship. (To this day, he’s not sure if any such tape actually exists.) The coach was focused on something else.
There’s something intangible that defines the upper echelon of competitive athletes. Collins’ father learned it well when he coached Michael Jordan on the Bulls in the 1980s. He learned it himself as a coach with USA Basketball watching Kobe Bryant and LeBron James cohabitate the court at the Olympics.
Collins saw something familiar in Spencer — a winner.
“I knew that there was that same wiring to him,” Collins told the Tribune.
One of the first things Collins learned that summer was that Spencer hated drills.
The early weeks of summer training are monotonous. Teams walk through the basic mechanics of the system. Shell drills and wind sprints dominate practices. And after four straight summers of playing nothing but pickup, Spencer was bored out of his mind.
The guard nagged Collins during water breaks and film sessions: “When are we going 5-on-5? When are we competing? When are we going to play basketball?”
Spencer had a lot of work to do. His physique was still filled out for lacrosse — thick torso, burly chest, a stark farmer’s tan on both arms. He lacked verticality. His shot needed work. He wasn’t acclimated to the intricacies of defensive shifts and sets. But despite Spencer’s lack of playing experience, his feel for the game transferred almost immediately.
Many offensive fundamentals of lacrosse are intertwined with the basics of basketball. Attackers utilize screen actions to create spacing. The sports even share similar vocabulary — pick-and-roll, drive-and-kick. In summer workouts, Collins noticed that Spencer manipulated screens with the adept confidence of a veteran guard. By opening day, he had won the starting point guard position.
Collins still believes Spencer could have grown into a All-Big Ten player if he had one more year of eligibility. But even on its own, that solo season showcased his potential.
“It just reaffirmed my belief in myself,” Spencer said. “It was a testament to the fact that — look, I can’t even shoot the ball yet. My body’s not where I wanted it to be yet. And I’m still able to do what I was doing. It reaffirmed that, OK, if I put my head down and start working, I’m going to make this thing happen.”
It might sound like all this was easy for Spencer. It wasn’t.
The Wildcats won only eight games that season. They went 3-17 in conference play. Spencer’s first and final season of college basketball ended with a brutal 74-57 blowout to Minnesota in the first round of the Big Ten Tournament.
Spencer hated it. He tried to be patient, to remember that this was all a learning process. It didn’t work. During most losses, he found himself on the bench or on the court, attempting to force some semblance of calm into his body, repeating the same mantra: Keep it cool.
“I didn’t do well with it,” Spencer said. “That’s one thing both parties would probably tell you deep down. No regret, but just going back I probably would have done a couple things differently in the locker room to help those guys. They were on the trajectory of being young: ‘We’re going to grow and get through this and figure this out.’ And I’m in here thinking, ‘I got one damn year to figure it out.’”
Collins knew this was a byproduct of Spencer’s environment. He was used to lacrosse, in which helmets and pads allow players to handle each other more roughly. The guard often crashed into his own teammates during contentious moments, clashing physically in a way meant to galvanize rather than discourage.
Spencer still hasn’t fully trained himself out of those tendencies — just ask Houston Rockets big man Alperen Şengün, who was on the receiving end of a headbutt from the point guard during Game 5 of a first-round playoff series in May.
But Collins never wanted to temper that passion. It’s why he brought Spencer to Evanston in the first place. The young players on that roster needed to learn to see losing as an impossibility. And one freshman in particular latched onto Spencer’s leadership style: Boo Buie, the program’s future all-time leading scorer.
Spencer and Buie both believed there was more for Northwestern basketball. And although Spencer wasn’t on the court for the victories of the ensuing seasons — qualifying for back-to-back NCAA Tournaments, knocking off No. 1 Purdue, Collins winning Big Ten Coach of the Year— his presence lingered in the locker room long after he left Evanston.
“What I wanted more than anything was for our players to see that fire and see that competitiveness and understand that’s what it takes to win,” Collins said. “That’s what he gave us.”
Northwestern was only the first in a series of stops on the way to the NBA. That season mostly showed Spencer what he lacked. His long-range shooting was almost nonexistent. He made only 12 3-pointers for Northwestern on 23.5% shooting from behind the arc.
When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the basketball world days after his last NCAA game, Spencer saw it as yet another opportunity. He secured access to a gym with his brother Cam — who now plays for the Memphis Grizzlies — and the pair logged three-hour two-a-day sessions with a shooting coach. Some weeks they took a rest day. Most of the time, they worked through the week.
Later that year, Spencer went to Germany to play his first professional minutes with the Hamburg Towers. His five appearances abroad were enough to gain attention in the G League, in which he bounced from the Capital City Go-Go to the Santa Cruz Warriors.
It took awhile to stick. He earned a full NBA contract with the Warriors last season — crucially subbing into the rotation in the playoffs — only to be waived over the summer and re-signed to another two-way deal in September. Then Steph Curry went down with a quad injury, opening and a hole in the lineup. Spencer was right back in the rotation.
The answer wasn’t always yes. But Spencer kept coming back, assured and insistent, reminding the Warriors again and again that they needed him.
“It’s just fun watching a guy who has had to fight for everything finally get his moment — and not only seize it but grab it by the neck,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said after Spencer dropped 19 points in his first career start Saturday against the Cleveland Cavaliers. “This guy is a competitor. He loves the competition, he loves to play, his teammates love playing with him. It’s beautiful to watch.”
More than six years ago, during that first visit to Evanston, Spencer told Collins his plan.
This wasn’t a one-off. He didn’t just want to play college ball. He wanted to play in the NBA. It wasn’t a dream. It was a goal meant to be completed.
Collins didn’t say anything. He wanted the kid to come to Northwestern. But he couldn’t quiet his own internal disbelief at Spencer’s brash confidence: Don’t get ahead of yourself. Let’s see if you can keep up with the Big Ten. Maybe get on a team in Europe, make a nice career for yourself abroad.
Six years later, Collins is glad he didn’t say a word. It probably wouldn’t have mattered if he did. Spencer doesn’t listen to doubters or detractors. And every time he steps on the court, the guard quietly proves himself right. This was always the plan. This was always attainable. It just took the right amount of time — and work — to be rewarded.
“I don’t think there’s anything else that makes me smile more than when I turn on a Warriors game and see him out there,” Collins said. “Not a single piece of this was handed to him.”
Spencer still isn’t sure what comes next.
He’s an NBA player, and a starter at that, albeit perhaps temporarily. That goal is more than accomplished. He has adapted his game to the NBA, slimming down to improve his agility, honing his shot to knock down more 3s in 17 games with the Warriors this season than in his entire stint with Northwestern.
But Spencer is still playing on borrowed time. He has logged 17 of his 50 eligible games as a two-way player. Eventually, the Warriors will need to convert him to a full-time contract — or send him back to the G League. Only one of those options is acceptable to the guard.
Spencer doesn’t want much. He isn’t in this for the fame and fortune. The guard still drives the same 2011 Honda CRV that shuttled him between lacrosse and basketball practices in high school. He prides himself on simplicity.
“Look, this is cliche, but if you told me I could live and my family would be taken care of and I could do all of this for free — then I would do it,” Spencer said.
If he’s honest, there’s only one thing Spencer wants: more time.
Time on the court. Time with the ball in his hands. Time to prove that this is where he has always belonged.