Now that NBA Free Agency has largely played out, players who are not likely to find an NBA home are now signing contracts with teams overseas. That includes a former member of the Los Angeles Lakers who never found his footing with the team: Juan Toscano-Anderson.
Every NBA team wants one or two bench players who work extremely hard, compete every minute they are on the court, and infect the entire roster with joy and connective tissue. That player was Juan Toscano-Anderson on the Golden State Warriors when they won the title in 2022.
The following summer, Toscano-Anderson hit free agency and the Lakers signed him to a contract to join their roster and hopefully fill a similar role for a team with designs on contending. The energetic forward had gone undrafted out of Marquette and played multiple seasons in the top Mexican league before getting his shot with the Warriors; now he was playing for one of the most storied franchises in basketball history.
An older Lakers team was looking for a spark from Toscano-Anderson, but things did not go well for either party. The Lakers limped through much of the season and needed some major changes at the Trade Deadline to right the ship. They ended the year 43-39, just above .500 and seventh in the Western Conference.
Unfortunately for Toscano-Anderson, some of those major midseason changes included him. He played 30 games for the Lakers and shot a frigid 20 percent from 3-point range, averaging only eight points, six rebounds and 2.5 assists per-36. He was solid defensively, but the offense fell to pieces when he was on the court.
He found himself dumped on the Utah Jazz, with whom he played 22 games the rest of the year. That summer he couldn't catch on with a team, but he did play a few weeks with the Sacramento Kings that season, appearing in 11 games.
Never able to recapture the magic of his seasons in Golden State, Toscano-Anderson spent last season in the G League with the Mexico City Capitanes, a homecoming of sorts for the Mexican-American player. This summer, however, it was time to look elsewhere.
Toscano-Anderson signed overseas
While he is not the type of player to absolutely dominate in the G League, he did average 17.2 points, 7.6 rebounds and 2.4 stocks (combined steals and blocks) for the Capitanes last year. He parlayed that this summer into a contract in Europe.
Pallacanestro Trieste is an Italian team that just won the level-2 title and moved into the Italian Lega Basket Serie A, the top league in Italy. To level up their roster they signed Toscano-Anderson this August to a contract to bolster their frontcourt and bring a decidedly un-European style of play to the roster.
The very best players in Europe could be on NBA rosters, and with Toscano-Anderson so close to being an NBA player, he will likely be an excellent player in Europe. Pallacanestro will ask him to play a major role, one he wasn't able to handle in the NBA.
The Lakers wish things had turned out differently with Juan Toscano-Anderson, but they moved on very quickly from him. Now he has moved on from the NBA and taken his talents to Italy.