CHICAGO — Spencer Jones’ first NBA start ended with a white-hot spotlight on him. He stood between a top-25 scorer in league history and the basket. The margin was three; the margin for error was zero. His team needed a defensive stop just to manufacture one last game-tying opportunity before the buzzer.

Jones is a physical wing defender with a rangy wingspan, but his aggressiveness got the best of him. DeMar DeRozan clocked that Jones’ hand was where it shouldn’t be, uncorked into a shooting motion and invited contact. He made the shot and drew the foul. Kings 128, Nuggets 123.

Two months later, on Jan. 28, Jones typed out a social media post. The topic on his mind was public failure — an experience shared, he posited, by professional athletes and business founders.

“You can’t hide from your weaknesses. The data is right there,” he wrote. “You can’t tell yourself it wasn’t that bad. Everyone already saw it. You’re forced to confront blind spots faster than you’d ever choose to. It’s uncomfortable. Sometimes humiliating. But it builds something. Call it exposure tolerance.”

By then, Jones was starting games regularly for the perpetually short-handed Nuggets — a whirlwind turn of events that had built up his exposure tolerance. As most people in their 20s would do, he was chronicling it online. He hit send on the post, and comments started pouring in as it gained traction on his preferred platform: LinkedIn.

Spencer Jones (21) of the Denver Nuggets grabs a rebound over Cason Wallace (22) of the Oklahoma City Thunder during the first quarter at Ball Arena in Denver, Colorado on Sunday, February 1, 2026. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)

An atypical road to a roster spot

Jones has been the most surprising success story of the Nuggets’ season, and he’s about to be their de facto trade deadline acquisition. After ducking the luxury tax this week, the team is preparing to convert Jones’ two-way contract to a standard NBA deal so that he can play out the season as part of Denver’s 15-man roster, league sources have told The Denver Post. The promotion will act as both a reward for his services in the absence of Aaron Gordon, and as an upgrade to Denver’s frontcourt depth ahead of what team officials hope will be a deep playoff run.

“He’s a rotation NBA player,” Nuggets coach David Adelman reiterated this week as Jones reached his games limit on the two-way contract.

His road to an NBA roster spot has not been typical. The LinkedIn account — which has now gone viral across other, more basketball-focused corners of the internet — is evidence of what Jones always thought his post-college life would be, before his improbable basketball career took off this season.

“I like to use the degree a little bit,” he joked to The Denver Post about his active presence on the social media platform meant for professional networking. He intended to use it for that as he forayed into the world of Silicon Valley start-ups. He still does. But he also shares insights and reflections on his day job: guarding star athletes.

“Basketball was always something that was an interest to him,” his dad, Dwayne Jones, said. “He was a big KU fan. … As to whether or not he dreamed of being a pro as a kid? I don’t think there was much of that.”

Instead, Jones was surrounded by a family of medical professionals while growing up in the Kansas City area. His paternal grandfather was a general surgeon, his maternal grandfather a physician, his dad an anesthesiologist. He has aunts and uncles who’ve been doctors and nurses. He wanted to major in biomedical engineering in college. “We almost had to talk Spencer out of taking too many AP courses in high school,” Dwayne said. “It’s like, ‘Look, you’re playing basketball. You’re trying to register for eight AP classes?’”

Basketball was an extracurricular but not his calling, Spencer thought. His grandfather, Herman Jones Jr., often regaled him with stories of 1950s Kansas City, where he was a pioneering Black doctor while Jayhawks coach Phog Allen was recruiting Wilt Chamberlain to play at Kansas. Herman was fond of telling Spencer that only three people in the area owned a flashy new convertible at the time. One belonged to a surgeon acquaintance. One belonged to the man’s son. The other was Wilt’s, a blatant recruiting violation from KU.

Spencer was influenced by those tales enough to write a biographical paper about Chamberlain in grade school. It was his first work of hoops writing, years before the LinkedIn posts.

Basketball eventually forced him to be flexible with his plans when he enrolled at Stanford on a last-minute athletic scholarship offer. “After about one summer of workouts, I was like, yeah, this is gonna be tough to manage,” Jones remembers. He ended up picking a major more conducive to the schedule of a Division I athlete: management science and engineering. It made sense to his interests, anyway. Jones had his reservations about following in the precise footsteps of his family history after hearing his dad’s complaints for years. He had his eyes on business as it related to science.

“My dad’s exact profession wasn’t super-enticing,” Jones said. “I was very interested by health, but I was more interested by the tech and advancements used in it. … When he was doing surgery, he was learning stem cell research and stuff like that. That stuff specifically about it was really interesting. But you find out that being a doctor is a ton of paperwork, a ton of insurance you have to deal with. That part, most of the health care industry still needs a lot of improving. … So I still took some health-specific classes (at Stanford). It was always wanting to be around the health tech sector but doing it in more of an entrepreneurial way.”

Stanford forward Spencer Jones (14) during an NCAA college basketball game against UCLA in Stanford, Calif., Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

Making a long-term investment

It wasn’t until after his freshman year that Jones started getting nudged by those in his orbit about the possibility of a pro hoops career. He had won a starting job almost immediately at Stanford, and he shot 43.1% from the 3-point line that first season. He was a 3-and-D guy. Nothing fancy. But the numbers jumped off the page. Dwayne was startled when a scout approached him and referred to his son as an NBA prospect.

“People were kind of giving me ideas that, ‘Hey, you’re somewhat close. Here’s what you need to work on to move the needle,’” Jones said. “But I didn’t think I was close enough to really take it seriously until around that junior year. … Junior year was like, OK, this is really within striking distance.”

Yet even as the NBA emerged as a borderline realistic possibility, he still made a pivotal basketball decision with his non-basketball career plans in mind. Stanford recruited Jones aggressively to stay for a fifth year when other programs tried to lure him into the transfer portal after his senior season. Andrew Luck and Bill Walton (who briefly attended Stanford Law School in the middle of his playing career) contributed to a video pitch.

The overarching idea was, in part, to remind Jones of all the business contacts he had made at the university. Staying would be a long-term investment. Transferring would be a short-term play for the largest sum of name, image and likeness money.

“They really pushed in on the names that knew me and all the founders and people with big positions within the school. … (They were) trying to re-show me what the Stanford name meant, which was great, because look, that’s the reason why (I stayed),” Jones said. “I could have made more money going to a different school. … But they were just like, ‘This is what you’ve built here.’ The people I’ve impressed and the people who’ve come to know me, and how I can use these people far beyond (school).”

Jones found the effort touching. He stayed for a fifth year, eclipsing 40% as a 3-point shooter again for a Stanford squad that didn’t make the NCAA Tournament. He went undrafted in 2024. The Nuggets quietly scooped him up on a two-way contract after the second round ended.

Denver Nuggets forward Spencer Jones (21) comes down with a defensive rebound in front of Houston Rockets center Steven Adams (12) on Saturday, Dec. 20, 2025, at Ball Arena in Denver. (Photo by Timothy Hurst/The Denver Post)

From the G League to the NBA

Teams can sign up to three players at a time on two-way deals, which allow the player to be maneuvered back and forth between the NBA and G League. Jones spent most of his time with the Grand Rapids Gold in his first year in the pros. One of his fellow two-ways, Trey Alexander, won Rookie of the Year in the G League.

But Jones was the only player the Nuggets wanted to retain in the summer of 2025. They decided his 3-and-D skillset was more translatable to the NBA, whereas a player who scores 25 points per game in the G League by having the ball every possession would be more likely to struggle when acclimating to a smaller, off-ball role. Adelman was early to point out at training camp last September that he believed there was a place in the NBA for Jones.

As the 6-foot-7 forward put it himself in a relevant January LinkedIn post: “I’ve been called a ‘glue guy’ a few times recently. Honestly, it’s one of the best compliments I’ve received in my career. Because most nights, the box score won’t explain why I played. … But glue guys don’t live in the box score. We live in the gaps.”

Jones isn’t giving up his other interests as a longer future in the sport materializes. He wears sneakers intended to decrease the risk of ankle injuries, made by a Brooklyn-based company that he invests in called Andiem. He has researched artificial intelligence and wonders how it can improve the health care industry by allowing doctors to focus more on patient care and less on paperwork. He monitors for worthwhile investment opportunities in other health care technology advancements.

Aside from those business ventures, he’s been working with a local nonprofit that provides high school education access to Colorado students who have been through the criminal justice system and aren’t welcomed back into traditional schools. And he has started taking painting lessons in downtown Denver. His mom was visiting his apartment recently when she noticed a couple of paintings on his wall inscribed with his initials, SKJ.

“My mom’s snooping around my place, I guess,” Jones said, laughing.

He’s considering a return to business school someday, whenever he’s done playing basketball. That’s about to be on hold for longer than he ever expected, though. The Nuggets are going to need Jones’ defense down the stretch this season, and they’re going to need team-friendly contracts on their books to offset their more expensive salaries in the next couple of years.

“What Spence has figured out that a lot of people don’t figure out at any point in their life is what he can’t do,” Adelman said. “So he doesn’t do it. And it’s really shown at the end of games. … He knows things that he shouldn’t be doing. Doesn’t do them. Just a really clean basketball player, and the guys trust him because of that.”

Adelman, like most, found out about the NBA’s most famous LinkedIn account recently. It has 24,000 followers and counting. Jones is happy to keep the posts coming, now that he has an eager audience. But he’s still a little confused by how much it’s blown up.

“I think he’s kind of like, ‘I don’t see what the big deal is,’” Dwayne said. “I guess to him, it’s not that big a deal to be on LinkedIn because I think several of the guys on his team at Stanford were using it. So he doesn’t think it’s that odd.”