Two days after Pat Spencer splashed a career-high six 3-pointers and scored a personal-best 20 points in a 101-97 comeback win on the road against the the Phoenix Suns, the Golden State Warriors converted the 29-year-old, two-way guard to a standard NBA contract for the second straight season.<\/p>\n
The team made Spencer’s promotion official<\/a> on Saturday, hours before a game in Los Angeles against the Lakers that could call for the former lacrosse star’s services, as Stephen Curry continues to recover from a right knee injury that forced him to exit a Jan. 30 loss to the Detroit Pistons<\/a> in the third quarter.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n Golden State had two roster spots open after dealing Jonathan Kuminga, Buddy Hield and Trayce Jackson-Davis, and receiving Kristaps Porzi\u0146\u0123is<\/a> before the trade deadline.<\/p>\n While the Warriors converted Spencer to a standard contract last season as well, that was in March in the lead-up to the playoffs. This time, he’s a legitimate backup point guard and scoring option off the bench, and his contributions are finally making more headlines than his unconventional route to the league.<\/p>\n Spencer is posting 5.8 points, 2.9 assists and 2.2 rebounds in 14.4 minutes per game across 36 outings this season. In his five starts, he’s averaged 14.6 points, 5.4 assists, 5 rebounds and 1.4 steals while shooting 54.2% from deep.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n He’s been much more willing to pull from long range, and, at times, he’s taken over games. Perhaps most notably, during a Dec. 4 thriller against the Philadelphia 76ers<\/a>, he announced himself as “that motherf***er” and then two days later started and scored 19 points in a road win over the Cleveland Cavaliers that had head coach Steve Kerr agreeing with the declaration<\/a>.<\/p>\n Famously, Spencer established himself as a college lacrosse great at Loyola (Maryland), where he won the Tewaaraton, the sport’s most prestigious award, before using the last bit of his eligibility to play basketball at Northwestern. He went undrafted in 2020 and then played overseas and in the G League prior to making his NBA debut with the Warriors in 2024.<\/p>\n Since, he’s persistently carved out a small role for himself within the organization. It’s never been bigger than it has been this season, though.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n Now he has the contract to show for it, and the injury-riddled Warriors need his help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two days after Pat Spencer splashed a career-high six 3-pointers and scored a personal-best 20 points in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":460519,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[31696,49,48,2357,8028,8217,6689,5407,1522,459,82963,1528,6002,82,13596,25586],"class_list":["post-460518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-buddy-hield","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cleveland-cavaliers","tag-detroit-pistons","tag-golden-state-warriors","tag-jonathan-kuminga","tag-lakers","tag-los-angeles","tag-nba","tag-pat-spencer","tag-philadelphia-76ers","tag-phoenix-suns","tag-sports","tag-stephen-curry","tag-trayce-jackson-davis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/460519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}