Anyone with a subscription want to cut and paste?
He Watched Steph vs. LeBron. Now He’s Playing With Them.The first time that Stephen Curry and LeBron James met in the NBA Finals, one of the fans in the Golden State Warriors’ crowd was a recent college graduate named Juan Toscano-Anderson. He watched the rest of the series on television, like anyone who grew up rooting for the Warriors, and he was at home in the Bay Area when they won the championship.
The NBA draft was held a few days later. If teams knew then what they know now, he might have been a first-round pick. But he wasn’t disappointed when he went undrafted. As it turns out, he wasn’t even watching.
Toscano-Anderson knew there was no way that he was going to play in the NBA.
Some players are undervalued. He was simply unvalued. But that night in 2015 began a series of preposterous developments that would take Juan Toscano-Anderson from his mother’s home in Oakland after college to Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, an open tryout for the G League, a spot at the end of the Warriors’ bench and now, incredibly, a game featuring the sport’s biggest stars.
He’s gone from being in the arena with Steph and LeBron to being on the court with them.
Wednesday’s showdown between the Warriors and Lakers in the NBA’s play-in tournament is the latest, unlikeliest chapter of the epic Steph vs. LeBron rivalry that defined the last decade of basketball. But the stakes are different—and so are their supporting casts. Many of their current teammates watched them play in four straight Finals while in college. Some were in high school and middle school. And one of them was in Oakland.
Juan Toscano-Anderson was born and raised in the shadow of Golden State’s home—he wears No. 95 in honor of a family house on 95th Avenue, so close to the team’s former arena that it’s in Curry’s shooting range—and the Warriors were part of him long before he became a part of the Warriors.
He went to their basketball camps when he was a kid. He watched their “We Believe” team beat a No. 1 seed in the first round when he was a teenager. He doesn’t have to be told how peculiar it is that most people now think of Golden State as a glittering dynasty. He knows the painful history of his favorite NBA team better than anyone in the locker room. “I grew up a Warriors fan,” Toscano-Anderson said. “We sucked for years.”
But the Warriors are partially responsible for him playing basketball in the first place. The person who steered Toscano-Anderson to basketball in elementary school—when he occasionally slept in his mother’s car and once had a second-grader pull a knife on him—was a teacher named Wilhelmina Attles. She’s married to the legendary Warriors player and coach Al Attles. “She just changed my life,” he said.
It would keep changing. Toscano-Anderson was in high school when the Warriors drafted Curry in 2009 and were sold to new owners in 2010. He was getting better every year, too. “I thought he had a chance to play professionally somewhere,” said Nick Jones, his coach. “But the NBA? No.”
Only by coincidence did his college coach begin recruiting him. Buzz Williams was sitting in a Las Vegas gym waiting for a summer game on Court 1 when that game was delayed and his attention drifted to Court 2. He was basically scouting blind, since he didn’t know the name of anybody on the court, but one player intrigued him. He texted an assistant coach for more information about this kid he had accidentally discovered, and that’s when he found out who he was and where Toscano-Anderson was from. “That’s a long way to Milwaukee,” thought Marquette’s coach at the time.
Williams had never been to Oakland before visiting him—the recruit’s mother made tamales—and Toscano-Anderson was so homesick at Marquette that he nearly transferred. But he also showed flashes of the skills that would translate to a future beyond college basketball.
“What he did as a player is similar to what everybody in the world is seeing over the past few months,” Williams said. “He played that way even when Steph Curry wasn’t on his team.”
But somebody who averages 3.8 points per game over four years in college is not exactly destined for the NBA, and Toscano-Anderson moved back to the Bay Area as Steph beat LeBron for the Warriors’ first title. Then, at the exact moment when it would have made sense for him to stop, he moved to the one place that would let him keep playing.
He would make it from Oakland to San Francisco by way of Mexico.
Toscano-Anderson was offered a spot on the Mexican national team and parlayed that experience into contracts with teams in Venezuela, Argentina and Mexico, where he was a league MVP, two-time champion and too good for his foreign league while not good enough for the NBA.
But he was ready to come home. Toscano-Anderson essentially invited himself to an open tryout for the Warriors’ affiliate in Santa Cruz, a job he wanted so badly that he asked a friend on the team to vouch for him. Toscano-Anderson made the team and then paid a tax to chase his dream: He turned down a six-figure salary in Mexico and took a G League salary of $35,000.
He played for Santa Cruz in 2018, earned a place on Golden State’s summer league team in 2019, returned to Santa Cruz and made his debut for the real Warriors in February 2020, a feel-good moment right before nobody would feel good for a very long time. He wasn’t expected to contribute much when the Warriors finally started playing again close to a year later. But then something curious happened.
Toscano-Anderson, a role player averaging 5.7 points who was supposed to make less in one season than Curry makes in one game, revealed himself to be invaluable next to their most valuable players.
The Warriors destroy teams with small-ball lineups when he shares the floor with Curry and Draymond Green. He’s a good passer, cutter and shooter on offense with the size, energy and intelligence to switch positions on defense. He knows exactly who he is, what to do and how to exploit the attention that Curry demands. He was even willing to crash into a scorer’s table and split open his head to get the ball to the best shooter on earth.
He’s also a bargain for the most expensive team in NBA history. His two-way contract paid roughly $450,000—half the salary of the lowest-paid players on league-minimum deals—and the Warriors signing him last week to a $1.7 million contract for next season was a no-brainer. If they could invent someone for their roster, he would be cheap, versatile and complementary to Curry. He would be a lot like this person who already exists.
LINK -
https://twitter.com/juanonjuan10/status/1360117559392051201That person often sounds like someone who can’t believe he’s paid money to watch Curry, “the Picasso of our time,” in the words of Toscano-Anderson. There are still moments when he acts like a fan who happens to be playing in the game.
Toscano-Anderson provided the canvas for one of Curry’s finest works this season when he found him for an open look and started celebrating as soon as the ball left his fingertips. He could tell what was going to happen next. He’d seen it happen from every part of the arena.
“Steph’s teammate knew it was cash before he even passed it,” read a tweet from the website Bleacher Report.
“Hi, I’m Steph’s teammate,” Toscano-Anderson replied. “My name’s Juan.”
