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    • Why BYU’s Jimmer Fredette is attending the 2024 Paris Olympics
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    Why BYU’s Jimmer Fredette is attending the 2024 Paris Olympics

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    More than 12 years after he became the biggest star in college basketball, Jimmer Fredette found himself in the backseat of a car in Kosovo driven by a man he barely knew, deep into the woods of a remote national park.

    Let him explain.

    Fredette said he and his 3-on-3 basketball teammates were in Kosovo for a tournament, but they had no place to practice. Then they heard about three public courts in the middle of a national park — covered in graffiti, with cracks in the sidewalk, but otherwise perfectly usable. So they set out.

    “This guy drove us out there and we said, ‘Listen, we’ll give you $100 if you stay here to make sure you don’t leave,'” Fredette said during a media roundtable earlier this year. “Because if you leave, we can’t go home.”

    Fortunately, Fredette continued, the man did not leave. And everything turned out well.

    It’s just one of the wild basketball stories he’s collected — and the unique places he’s seen — during a remarkable yet unconventional career.

    Over the past 15 years, Fredette has been the unanimous college basketball player of the year, an NBA lottery pick, a near-NBA flop, a Chinese Basketball Association legend and, most recently and perhaps definitively, a 2024 Olympian. After effectively retiring from 5-on-5 basketball in 2021, he’s found a second home in the niche world of 3-on-3, where he’ll lead Team USA to its first pool game against Serbia on Tuesday.

    “You never know where life is going to take you, right?” Fredette said. “For me, it’s just the way it’s been. There’s no rhyme or reason to it.”

    Fredette’s path to Paris included pit stops on five continents, with tournaments in a wide range of places, including Mongolia, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates and Santiago, Chile. Between his 3-on-3 travels and professional stints in China and Greece, he figures he’s been to most countries in both Asia and Europe.

    “We call it passport stamp kingdom,” he said with a smile. “We are stamp kingdom.”

    Most basketball fans will remember Fredette, now 35, from his college days at BYU. He was not only a consensus All-American but a transformative shooter who became something of a cultural phenomenon whose name was recognizable even among casual sports fans. The Sacramento Kings drafted him 10th overall in the 2011 NBA draft, between future NBA all-stars Kemba Walker and Klay Thompson.

    Fredette’s time in the NBA, however, wasn’t as smooth as theirs. He spent parts of three seasons in Sacramento before being cut, then went on to short stints with Chicago and New Orleans. By 2015, Fredette had dropped down to the NBA’s D-League. And by late 2016, he had left the U.S. altogether, signing with the Shanghai Sharks.

    “I think I was a little ahead of my time,” Fredette said, when asked about his NBA career. “I was shooting from really long distance in college, and in the NBA at that time, you didn’t have that kind of skill set. I came in with that kind of skill set, and if I don’t have that kind of green light to be able to do that, you’re taking away half of my skill set.”

    In China, though, Fredette did have that green light—and he took advantage of it. In his first three seasons with the Sharks, he shot nearly 27 times per game and averaged more than 37 points, with two games in which he scored 70 or more. But after a brief return to the NBA, then to Greece, then back to China during the COVID-19 pandemic, Fredette decided he wanted to spend more time with his family and focus on a second career in venture capitalism.

    And that’s where Fran Fraschilla comes in.

    In the spring of 2022, the ESPN analyst and former college basketball coach joined USA Basketball as a senior advisor for the men’s 3×3 basketball program. He was tasked with helping the program rebound from its failure to qualify for the 2021 Olympics. He heard that Fredette had retired from 5-on-5 basketball and thought that 3-on-3 might appeal to him because it offered him the opportunity to continue playing but with less of a time commitment.

    After a two-hour lunch in Denver that summer, Fraschilla said, Fredette was in.

    “Jimmer is the poster boy for USA 3×3,” Fraschilla said in an interview. “He’s had a great career. He was available because he was retired. … He’s really perfect for the sport.”

    For Fraschilla, it was not only that Fredette is “a basketball icon in many ways,” but also a great shooter in top form. He thought that type of profile would fit well in a 3-on-3 situation, where teams play with up to 21 men with few stoppages.

    “It’s just a whole different game,” Fredette explained. “Obviously a faster pace, fast shot clock, you have to be in a different kind of condition. It’s not so much vertical, up and down sprinting. It’s more horizontal, quick bursts.”

    It’s also a much more physical sport, Fredette said, which he enjoyed as a former high school football player.

    He also found that it gave him the balance he was looking for, allowing him to get his kids to school, play sports, and focus on venture capital work in the afternoons. He quickly became a key player for Team USA, helping the Americans to a Pan American Games title last year and a runner-up finish in the 2023 FIBA ​​3×3 World Cup.

    “His talent is so great that he’s, if not the best player on the 3×3 world tour, he’s probably one of the three best players,” Fraschilla said. “So he gave USA Basketball a huge boost.”

    In return, 3-on-3 basketball gave Fredette a second chance at an opportunity he thought was long gone: the Summer Olympics. He knows he took an unorthodox path to Paris. And he acknowledges that his life in basketball hasn’t exactly gone according to plan. Instead of a 15-year career in the NBA, he’s traveled to 15 different countries in the past year to play 3-on-3 basketball.

    When asked if he imagined the nomadic life he now leads, Fredette replied no and laughed.

    “I’ve had great times in my career and I’ve had tough times in my career — just like a lot of people do in their lives, whether it’s in athletics or anything else,” he said. “The biggest thing for me is that as soon as one door closes, another one opens. And I can go all the way into that door.”

    Contact Tom Schad at [email protected] or on social media @Tom_Schad.

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