Jimmer Fredette, a cult hoops hero, is back as a three-on-three Olympian (2024)

Fredette’s face looks older and rougher, with forehead wrinkles worn deeper. He’s no longer the boyish BYU sensation of late-night college basketball games with endless highlights of outrageous jump shots from seemingly anywhere that became known as “Jimmermania.”

“He was Stephen Curry before Stephen Curry,” said Canyon Barry, Fredette’s U.S. teammate (though Curry starred at Davidson just before Fredette did at BYU).

But that was 13 years ago, before Jimmermania withered in the NBA, before Fredette’s years in the G League back when it was still the D-League; before the Shanghai Sharks, for whom he scored more than 36 points per game; before the day, two years ago, when Fran Fraschilla, the former college coach and TV commentator now with USA Basketball, called wondering whether he wanted to try a new sport and maybe go to the Olympics.

Fredette — 33 at the time, having spent a final season in China playing games and then returning to a covid quarantine hotel while his pregnant wife and two children were half a world away in Denver — said “yes.”

“It’s kind of an unorthodox path to get to the Olympics, right?” he said with a laugh.

The three-on-three game, which starts here Tuesday, is not a place for sensations. In the United States, this version of the game has been an afterthought, something the NBA stars would never imagine doing. The rules could have been cooked up in a Sunday pickup game: half-court, 10-minute games, three-pointers count for two, regular baskets just one, first team to 21 wins, a 12-second shot clock. Olympic organizers consider it the kind of fast sport that can bring a new generation of fans to the Games. Basketball purists roll their eyes.

“You can watch it in a single TikTok sitting,” said U.S. men’s coach Joe Lewandowski, a high school English teacher in Butler, Pa., who spent four seasons as an NAIA and junior college coach.

While the U.S. women have dominated three-on-three basketball, winning gold at the Tokyo Olympics the first year the sport was in the Games, the men didn’t even qualify. Finding good players has been a challenge; there’s nothing glamorous about being a three-on-three player in the United States.

The players have abandoned any distant NBA dreams they might have held. They do not live the “Dream Team” life. The travel is grueling — to remote locales, often sleeping two to a room, sometimes with beds almost next to each other.

When Fredette showed up in 2022, the players wondered whether he would be able to adapt — perhaps none more than Barry, who was in high school during Jimmermania and would scream “Jimmer!” with his teammates when they would toss up crazy shots at the end of practice. Barry understands celebrity: He’s the youngest son of Basketball Hall of Famer Rick Barry; three of his older brothers played in the NBA.

Thrown into a tournament right away, Fredette struggled to understand the rules. In one of his first games, he made a jumper and immediately found the other team’s biggest player boxing him out, then catching a lob pass and scoring before Fredette even realized what was happening. Quickly, though, Fredette adapted, and the U.S. team got better. Last year, it won a tournament for the first time in years. It gave the players hope they might be building something bigger.

What they found is that three-on-three is perfect for Jimmermania. Lewandowski calls Fredette the team’s best player and not just because of his shooting.

No one in three-on-three can make a pass to the opposite corner of the court. The shot clock’s too short; the defenders are too quick. No one dares to even look — except Fredette.

“He sees things the others don’t,” Lewandowski said.

Even more surprising is Fredette’s defense. NBA executives always said he was too slow defensively, but with fewer players on the court and none of the rotation help that comes in the five-on-five game, Fredette has become a top defender.

In a recent tournament, Lewandowski said, the opponent’s big man had slipped away from a screen and slid open toward the basket, but as the pass rocketed toward him, Fredette raced from what Lewandowski called “the complete opposite side of the court” to steal the ball.

“It probably won us the game,” Lewandowski said.

The U.S. team is a strange mix. In addition to Fredette and Barry, it includes Kareem Maddox, a 34-year-old former Princeton forward who was a podcast producer, and Dylan Travis, who started his college career at an NAIA school before finishing at Division II Florida Southern. Something about the raggedness of the group appeals to Fredette.

Fredette has thought a lot about how he went from the 2011 national college player of the year to bouncing from Sacramento to Chicago to New Orleans to New York to Phoenix and all the tryouts at other places that didn’t work out. He heard the usual things about being too slow on defense and not consistent enough as a shooter to justify being on a roster, but he’s certain the real problem is that he was ahead of his time.

He came into the NBA before it began to value three-pointers above all. He wonders what would have happened if he had gotten the “green light” that players get today.

“You never know where life will take you,” he said. “I’ve had awesome times in my career, and I’ve had tough times in my career, much like many people in their lives, whether it’s athletes or someone else. The biggest thing for me is that once one door closes, another one opens and being able to go all the way in on that door.

“And that’s what I felt like I’ve been able to do throughout my career, whether it be in China, Europe, the NBA and now three-on-three. I was like, ‘Hey, I’ve got something I can be better at.’”

He doesn’t need to be here. His NBA contracts have paid him almost $9 million. He has his own venture capital firm targeting growing tech companies. Half of his days is spent working out and practicing basketball; the other half is spent in meetings. But there’s something about this chance. He always loved the Olympics but never thought he would be good enough to play in them.

The three-on-three version of the game is “a sport with very little guarantees,” Lewandowski likes to say.

Even practices are an adventure. Once, Fredette and the rest of the group landed in Kosovo with no place to practice. Eventually, Lewandowski was able to secure a beaten-up outdoor court in the middle of a forest well outside of town. They found a cab to take them. When they finally got to the court, which had no nets, they paid the driver to stay after realizing there was no other way they would be able to get back.

In Marseille, France, the wind roared so hard off the ocean that the lights hanging above the court appeared about to fall down. In Mongolia, they found the cars have steering wheels on both sides, and drivers seem to use either randomly.

Through all that, they made it to the Olympics. They finished sixth in qualifying for Paris last year but won the Pan American Games and finished second in the World Cup. There’s reason to think they can make a run here as well.

Long after Jimmermania faded, maybe a revival tour is possible.

“This has been exciting for me,” Fredette said. “It kind of gives me a little bit of a new life on basketball.”