Jimmer Fredette rises again

Two summers ago, USA Basketball sent an old college coach to try to reel in a big-name recruit.

Fran Fraschilla journeyed to Denver in hopes of persuading Jimmer Fredette to leave traditional 5-on-5 basketball behind and to reinvent himself as the world’s most famous 3×3 player.

Since 3×3 players are required to accumulate points on the world tour in order to be eligible to play for their countries in the Olympics, USA Basketball could not simply select LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Steph Curry and be done with it. It had to scramble to find players passed on by NBA and top-tier overseas clubs yet talented enough to challenge for a medal.

Fredette by then was in the twilight of his well-chronicled journey from BYU folk hero, to NBA flop, to basketball nomad. He had yo-yoed between the G-League, Greece and China for five years before declining lucrative offers in order to take a year-long break from professional basketball and devote more time to his wife and three young children.

Over cheeseburgers and ice teas in June 2022, Fraschilla asked the then 33-year-old Fredette to bring Jimmermania to 3×3 basketball. Fraschilla told Fredette that 3×3 had made its Olympic debut in Tokyo in 2021, that Team USA had failed to qualify and that Fredette could lead the push to right that wrong if he was willing to be away from his family for six to eight weekends the following year.

“My brain is always calculating who might be good at the sport,” Fraschilla, a senior advisor to USA Basketball, told Yahoo Sports. “I knew he still had game and I knew he was competitive, so I just took a shot.”

To Fredette, 3×3 basketball was faintly reminiscent of the half-court pickup games he played as a kid, only faster, bruisingly physical and more strategic. The winning team was the first to 21 or whoever led after a single 10-minute period. Baskets were worth two points from behind the arc or one point from inside it.

Fraschilla’s pitch intrigued Fredette because 3×3 provided the competitive outlet he craved and a schedule that afforded him year-round family time. It also helped that Fredette is a lifelong Olympics junkie who dreamed of winning a gold medal even before he took aim at a Final Four or an NBA title.

By the end of his lunch with Fraschilla, Fredette was already making plans to dive into a variant of basketball he previously didn’t know existed. To Fredette, this obscure sport was his best chance to extend his career and give his tangled basketball odyssey a joyful ending.

And now Tuesday, Fredette along with three teammates — Canyon Barry, Kareem Maddox and Dylan Travis — will begin a quest for gold in Paris.

“As soon as I heard ‘Olympics,’ I was like, ‘I’m all in,’” Fredette said. “I saw this as the opportunity of a lifetime.”

The rise and fall of Jimmermania

Jimmermania first swept the nation the night of January 26, 2011.

That’s when Fredette validated his reputation as college basketball’s most feared scorer at the expense of Kawhi Leonard and previously unbeaten San Diego State. BYU’s senior guard torched the fourth-ranked Aztecs for 43 points, pulling up going right or going left, off balance or off the wrong foot, from the paint or from impossibly deep range.

Video clips of Fredette’s most audacious shots instantly set social media ablaze. Kevin Durant described Fredette as the “best scorer in the world.” Rap star Nelly called Fredette “the truth.” Steve Nash gushed on Twitter, “Jimmer Fredette? Man, that name’s straight outta Hoosiers. No wonder he never misses.”

As Fredette’s scoring exploits rocketed him to prominence, it became more difficult for him to venture out in public. He resorted to enrolling in online courses after weeks of getting mobbed on campus and showing up to classes an hour late. He ordered most meals via delivery to avoid constantly being interrupted mid-bite by autograph seekers. He checked into hotels using an alias and left BYU’s home arena undercover after games to avoid being spotted.

“My now-wife, at the time my girlfriend, had to drive her car to a secret entrance so that I could leave because there were so many people waiting outside,” Fredette told Yahoo Sports in a 2018 interview.

Selected 10th overall by Sacramento in the 2011 NBA Draft, Fredette struggled to carve out a niche playing against the world’s best. He logged sporadic minutes with the Kings before they cut him midway through his third season. He bounced between five NBA teams thereafter, the door slamming shut after a six-game cameo with the Phoenix Suns during the 2018-19 season.

Defense was Fredette’s undoing at the NBA level. Opposing teams targeted him relentlessly. The bad habits that Fredette developed resting on defense at BYU came back to bite him. Even when he did exert maximum effort, he still got lost away from the ball and was a step slow trying to stay in front of his man.

The argument in favor of Fredette was always that his scoring and playmaking on offense could compensate for his revolving-door defense, but that never materialized in the NBA. He never averaged more than the 7.6 points per game he put up as a rookie and never shot anywhere near as efficiently as he did in college.

Those close to Fredette are quick to point out the dysfunction that Fredette stepped into after Sacramento drafted him. He had no summer-league games or training camp to acclimate himself to the NBA before his lockout-shortened rookie season. Then the Kings fired coach Paul Westphal seven games into Fredette’s career.

Subsequent NBA coaches, Fredette says, often didn’t want him on the team. They were hesitant to give him the freedom to try to launch long-distance threes and recapture his college magic. He often played off ball, a difficult adjustment for a player accustomed to creating his own shots almost exclusively off the dribble.

“I think I was a little ahead of my time where I was shooting from really long range in college and it wasn’t really like that in the NBA at that point,” Fredette said. “If I don’t have that type of green light to be able to do that, you’re taking away half of my skill set.”

Jimmermania waned as Fredette’s NBA career fizzled, but it never fully extinguished. He became a sensation in China, capitalizing on an offense built around him to surpass 70 points on three separate occasions. A 41-point exhibition performance against the Houston Rockets had fans clamoring for their favorite NBA teams to sign him. So did subsequent shooting barrages while playing in The Basketball Tournament.

When Fredette chose to take a hiatus from basketball after the 2020-21 season, it wasn’t because his passion for basketball dwindled or he had lost a step. Fredette was still scarred from the memory of seven months of isolation from his wife and kids during the COVID-19 pandemic, forbidden to leave his Shanghai hotel room except to attend practices and games. He could no longer bear missing key moments in his kids’ childhood or celebrating birthdays and holidays via FaceTime.

“I could tell that bothered him a lot,” older brother TJ Fredette told Yahoo Sports. “He’s extremely family oriented. Always has been. So I think that played a big role in him not going back overseas and trying something different.”

Learning a new game

Joe Lewandowski remembers exactly when he realized that Fredette wasn’t just messing around with 3×3 basketball.

The USA Basketball 3×3 head coach sat down with Fredette in early 2023 to figure out which World Tour events he intended to play.

Sensitive to Fredette’s desire for family time, Lewandowski assumed he’d want to skip some of the far-flung tournaments in places like Sükhbaatar, Mongolia, Debrecen, Hungary, or Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Fredette informed Lewandowski that he intended to participate in all 12 events even though that basically meant crisscrossing the globe twice in five months.

“Hold on, you’re going to all of them?” Lewandowski said.

“I’m all the way in this,” Fredette responded. “I have to learn.”

Over the next few weeks, Fredette studied other countries’ top 3×3 players until he knew their names and their games inside out. Then he worked on adjusting to the nuances of the 3×3 game, from the 12-second shot clock, to the increased bumping and hand-checking, to how quickly the game transitions from offense to defense.

Before long, Fredette became comfortable with 3×3’s different actions and offensive sets and began to build camaraderie with U.S. teammates Canyon Barry, Kareem Maddox and Dylan Travis. He has even made strides adjusting to 3×3’s lack of helpside defense and to defending on an island in the post or on the perimeter.

“Dylan is always yelling at me saying that I’m not glued to my guy,” Fredette said with a chuckle, “so I’ve gotta keep getting better at that.”

In 2023, the goal for Team USA was to accumulate enough points on the 3×3 world tour to qualify for the Olympics by last November. The Americans wanted to avoid a repeat of the previous cycle when they left their fate to a single Olympic qualifying tournament and crashed out in the quarterfinals to fall short of securing one of three available berths.

Buoyed by Fredette’s feathery shooting, slick passing and poise under pressure, Team USA entered last November as the No. 2 team in the FIBA world rankings and secured an Olympic spot without having to participate in the qualifying tournament. Lewandowski came away awed by Fredette’s ability to defend bigger guys in the post, to make plays out of the pick and roll and to sink shots under duress.

Said Lewandowski with a laugh, “You get him in any sort of screening action with the ball, and he’s an absolute magician.”

Even though USA Basketball named Fredette its men’s 3×3 player of the year last December, the ex-BYU star showed up to camp this spring even fitter than before. Fredette seldom needed to sub out of games anymore, nor gasped for air or tugged on the bottom of his shorts after long stretches without a stoppage.

“I think he realized that in order to be the best player in the world at this, you have to be more than the most talented player,” Lewandowski said.

A pair of game-winning baskets at an April tournament in Japan offered validation for Fredette’s intense winter workouts. Hours after Fredette’s contested turnaround jumper at the buzzer beat a team from the Netherlands in the semifinals, his right-wing jumper toppled the reigning world No. 1 team from Serbia in the championship game.

When they were younger, TJ Fredette remembers his brother staying up late during both the Summer and Winter Olympics watching every obscure sport imaginable. Half the time, TJ says, “Jimmer would be watching something that I’d never even heard of.”

All these years later, it’s Jimmer who is poised to don a red, white and blue jersey and compete for Olympic gold. The former BYU star describes Paris 2024 as “the cherry on top” of his long, winding basketball journey.

“He’s so thrilled to represent the United States,” TJ Fredette said. “You’ll never find somebody who likes the Olympics more than him and to be able to go at the end of his career makes it all the more special. So for that reason, this could be the pinnacle of his career.”