Pat Spencer, Chris Collins Detail Warriors Star's Journey from Lacrosse to Northwestern Hoops
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Former Northwestern University men's basketball standout Pat Spencer has enjoyed his best pro season yet. The 6-foot-2 vet, 29, was recently promoted from a two-way deal to a standard roster contract for the rest of the 2025-26 season.
Across 39 bouts with the 29-26 Warriors this year (including eight starts!), the point guard has been averaging 6.3 points on .436/.403/.765 shooting splits, 3.2 assists, 2.3 rebounds and 0.7 steals a night. He was just a 23.5 percent 3-point shooter at Northwestern, so that 40 percent rate represents a massive leap.
Spencer's development into a full-time, NBA-caliber pro on a play-in tournament team was hardly guaranteed. He was a lacrosse superstar in college initially.
His undergrad coach with the Loyola University Maryland Greyhounds men’s lacrosse squad, Charley Toomey, raved about Spencer's insane motor, per Dov Weinstein Elul of The Daily Northwestern.
“He was a constant competitor, to the point that I’ve never seen it,” Toomey said. “You don’t want to play him in checkers.”
From 2016-19 with the Greyhounds, Spencer notched the NCAA Division I men's lacrosse record for assists and finished second in cumulative points scored all-time. He earned the Patriot League Offensive Player of the Year award across all four of his years at Loyola.
Over the summers, however, Spencer revisited his other sports love: basketball.
“He wouldn’t pick up a lacrosse stick,” his father Bruce Spencer reflected.
Pat Spencer was selected with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2019 Premier Lacrosse League Draft, but he had his heart set on a return to hoops.
“The four years at Loyola were really magical,” his mother Donna Spencer noted. “We loved it, he loved it, but it just wasn’t his dream.”
Lacking any college game tape, Spencer struggled to find an NCAA basketball opportunity. But Northwestern head coach Chris Collins saw something in him.
“When you’re the best in the world at something, whatever that is, there’s a greatness to that, and Pat carries some of that,” Collins said. “I just felt, even if he wasn’t a great basketball player, some of his qualities would rub off on our younger guys.”
Spencer earned a scholarship and attended Northwestern as a graduate student in 2019-20.
“I knew I was going to have to learn a lot about my game and my body,” Pat Spencer said. “That whole year was really a learning experience for me.”
He next began his pro career with German club the Hamburg Towers. He returned to the U.S. at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, opting to hone his game with a trainer.
Spencer suited up for the Washington Wizards' NBAGL affiliate, the Capital City Go-Go, for 2021-22. He then languished in the G League for another season, with the Santa Cruz Warriors, Golden State's G League affiliate. He saw his first NBA action midway through the 2023-24 season, when he inked a two-way deal with the Warriors.
“You try to embrace everything and enjoy it along the way, but when you’re wired competitively, sometimes it’s hard to take those moments in,” Spencer said of his trajectory to this point. “I’m sure one day I’ll be able to look back on it all and appreciate the journey.”
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An Evanston native, Alex Kirschenbaum is also a proud Northwestern alum. He has written for Bleacher Nation, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Hoops Rumors, Trailers From Hell, Men's Journal, and Bulls fan sites Blog-A-Bull and Pippen Ain't Easy, among others. Alex knows Zach Collins has given the Bulls some good years, but he'll never forgive the then-Gonzaga center for that very obvious goaltend against the Wildcats during the second round of the 2017 NCAA Tournament.