A dozen years or so after being the biggest star in college basketball, Jimmer Fredette found himself in Kosovo, getting into the back of a car driven by a man he barely knew and heading deep into the forest of a remote national park.
Let him explain.
Fredette and his 3v3 Basketball The teammates were in Kosovo for a tournament and had nowhere to practice, so they found three public courts in the middle of a national park: dotted with graffiti and with cracked pavement, but otherwise perfectly fine. So off they went.
“This guy drove us up there, and we said, ‘Look, if you stay here and make sure you don’t leave, we’ll give you $100,'” Fredette recalled at a media roundtable earlier this year. “Because if you leave, we can’t go home.”
Fortunately, Fredette continued, “the guy didn’t leave, and everything turned out fine.”
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This is just one of the wild basketball stories he’s compiled and the unique places he’s seen throughout his remarkable, yet unconventional, career.
Over the past 15 years, Fredette has been a unanimous college basketball player of the year, an NBA draft lottery pick, an NBA near-fail player, a Chinese Basketball Association legend and, most recently, perhaps finally, an Olympian for 2024. 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 in its opening pool game against Serbia on Tuesday.
“You never know where life is going to take you,” Fredette said, “and for me it just happened. There was no rhyme or reason.”
Fredette’s journey to Paris included pit stops on five continents with tournaments in places as diverse as Mongolia, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates and Santiago, Chile. His 3-on-3 travels and professional stints in China and Greece have taken him to most countries in Asia and Europe.
“We call it passport stamp rich,” he said with a smile. “We are stamp rich.”
Most basketball fans will remember Fredette, now 35, from his time at BYU. Not only was he an All-American, he was also a game-changing shooter and became something of a cultural phenomenon and a household name among sports fans. The Sacramento Kings selected him 10th overall in the 2011 NBA Draft, between future NBA All-Stars Kemba Walker and Klay Thompson.
But Fredette’s time in the NBA wasn’t as smooth. He spent parts of three seasons with Sacramento before being released, then had brief stints with Chicago and New Orleans. By 2015, Fredette had been relegated to the NBA’s D-League. And by the end of 2016, he’d left the U.S. for good, signing with the Shanghai Sharks.
“I think I was a little ahead of my time,” Fredette said when asked about his NBA career. “In college, I was good at long-range shooting, and there wasn’t a lot of that in the NBA at that time. I came into the NBA with those skills, and if I don’t get the green light to be able to do that, then half of my skills are taken away.”
But in China, Fredette was given the green light, and he took advantage. In his first three seasons with the Sharks, he averaged more than 37 points on nearly 27 shots per game, including two games with more than 70 points. But after a brief return to the NBA during the COVID-19 pandemic, then a trip back to Greece and then back to China, Fredette decided he wanted to spend more time with his family and focus on a second career in venture capitalism.
This is where Fran Fraschilla comes in.
In the spring of 2022, the ESPN analyst and former college basketball coach will join USA Basketball as a senior adviser to the men’s 3×3 basketball program, tasked with helping revive the program after it missed out on Olympic qualification in 2021. When he heard Fredette was moving away from 5-on-5 basketball, he thought 3-on-3 might be more appealing to him, with a chance to continue playing with fewer minutes.
After a two-hour lunch in Denver that summer, Fredette got involved, Fraschilla said.
“Jimmer is a U.S. 3×3 representative,” Fraschilla said in an interview. “He’s had a great career. He was able to compete because he retired. … He’s just a perfect fit for the sport.”
To Fraschilla, Fredette is not only “a basketball icon in so many ways,” but he’s also a great shooter and in great shape — a profile he thought would translate well to a 3-on-3 game in which teams play 21 players with little time to rest.
“It’s a totally different game,” Fredette explained, “Obviously it’s faster paced, the shot clock is faster, so you have to play in a different type of position, you’re quicker horizontally rather than running vertically or up and down.”
The game is also much more physical, Fredette said, something he enjoyed as a former high school football player.
He also found it provided the balance he was looking for: getting his kids to school, training, and focusing on his venture capital job in the afternoon. He quickly became a key player on the U.S. team, helping lead the U.S. to victory at last year’s Pan American Games and a runner-up finish at the 2023 FIBA 3×3 World Cup.
“His talent is such that he’s probably one of the best three players, if not the best player, on the 3×3 World Tour,” Fraschilla said, “so he’s a tremendous asset to USA Basketball.”
In return, 3-on-3 basketball gave Fredette another chance at something he thought had slipped away a long time ago. Summer OlympicsHe knows his path to Paris was unconventional, and he acknowledges that his basketball career didn’t go as planned: Instead of a 15-year NBA career, he spent the past year traveling to 15 countries playing 3-on-3 basketball.
When asked if he ever imagined the nomadic life he now leads, Fredette simply replied, “No,” and laughed.
“I’ve had great times and tough times in my career, as a lot of people go through in life, whether in sport or anything else,” he said. “The most important thing for me is that when one door closes, another one opens, and you can just go for it.”
Contact Tom Schad at [email protected] or on social media. Tom Shad.
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