Juan Toscano-Anderson of Warriors becomes the first player of Mexican heritage to win an NBA championship

Juan Toscano-Anderson may not have been on the court during the Golden State Warriors’ NBA Finals victory, but he made history anyway.

With the Warriors’ 103-90 Game 6 victory against the Boston Celtics on Thursday, the Oakland native became the first player of Mexican origin to win an NBA championship. He just played one minute and 19 seconds for the Warriors in the series, but he’ll still win a ring.

Toscano-Anderson scored 4.1 points and 2.4 rebounds in 13.6 minutes per game with the Warriors in 73 regular-season games.

Toscano-Anderson saw the Warriors’ first three championships. Despite entering the 2015 NBA draught, he wasn’t even in the league when Golden State won the Larry O’Brien Trophy in 2018, and that’s just the beginning of one of the league’s most amazing stories.

Juan Toscano-journey Anderson’s to an NBA title

The Warriors are full of underdogs, such as a small point guard who couldn’t find a significant Division I offer or an undersized power forward who went in the second round of the draught, but none has taken a more unlikely route to the NBA than Toscano-Anderson.

Rewind to 2015, and Toscano-Anderson is nearing the end of a respectable, but not very memorable, career at Marquette. As a senior, he averaged 8.3 points and 5.7 rebounds per game, hardly NBA benchwarmer figures, and his lack of NBA qualities kept him from hearing, or even expecting, his name called during the draught.

Most college basketball players with NBA aspirations opt for G League or, if that fails, foreign chances at that time. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Toscano-Anderson received no proposals to do so. He was not wanted by any league.

Toscano-Anderson received a chance with the Mexican national team after two months of living with his mother, and he did well enough to obtain an offer from the Soles de Mexicali of Mexico’s Liga Nacional de Baloncesto Profesional.

Over the course of four years, Toscano-Anderson emerged into one of Mexico’s biggest basketball talents, capturing MVP accolades and two LNBP championships, a star turn that landed him a shot… with the G League, where he began playing for Golden State’s Santa Cruz Warriors in 2018. With one more good year under his belt, Toscano-Anderson was drafted into the NBA as a 26-year-old rookie.

His arrival coincided with the Warriors’ lowest point during the 2019 NBA Finals, but he got enough playing time to persuade the organisation that he was worth maintaining. Juan Toscano-Anderson is presently a champion in the NBA.