Former BYU star Jimmer Fredette (remember him?) reinvents himself in 3×3 basketball

PARIS — When he was a kid with a mop of curly hair in upstate New York, Jimmer Fredette was regularly subjected to “The Gauntlet.”

TJ, his older brother and de facto medieval trainer, noticed that a church in nearby Queensbury had a long, dark hallway with doorways and recesses where people could hide. They turned out the lights and had young Jimmer try to dribble from one end to the other while TJ and their friends would leap from the shadows, trying to knock him into the walls and strip him of the ball.

It taught him how to dribble with his head up, how to keep the ball close to his body, how to keep a low center of gravity to maintain balance, how to react to unforeseen defensive maneuvers. It also, unwittingly, prepared him for the unpredictable.

Prepared him for his life and career.

A dim light illuminated the end of the hallway. The goal was to reach it.

Two decades after those tortuous afternoons dribbling “The Gauntlet,” 13 years after terrorizing San Diego State as the nation’s leading scorer at BYU, four years after an ignominious pro career washed out on three continents, three years after joining a venture capital firm, five months after his 35th birthday, he has.

Fredette isn’t playing for Team USA in the five-on-five basketball competition at the Summer Olympics, but he is playing basketball in Paris. He’s playing 3×3, a halfcourt, outdoor bastardization of James Naismith’s game that made its Olympic debut in 2021 in Tokyo and has gained more traction in Europe than the United States.

“You never know where life will take you,” Fredette, now 35, says. “I’ve had awesome times in my career and I’ve had tough times in my career, much like anybody in their lives, whether it’s athletics or something else. The biggest thing for me is once a door closes, another opens and being able to go all in through that door.

“It’s given me a new life in basketball. It’s been a crazy and wild journey, but I wouldn’t change it for anything. … It’s an unorthodox path to get to the Olympics, right?”

He and SDSU’s Kawhi Leonard both left college basketball in 2011 after a storied Mountain West rivalry of epic games and sold-out arenas and students camping overnight for tickets. Fredette was the conference and national player of the year, and he went five picks earlier in the NBA Draft at No. 10.

Then their paths forked.

A decade later, Leonard had won two NBA titles and been Finals MVP in both and named to six All-Star Games. Career earnings: $275 million.

Fredette went from BYU … to the Sacramento Kings … to the Chicago Bulls … to the New Orleans Pelicans … to the San Antonio Spurs for training camp … to the G League’s Westchester (N.Y.) Knicks … to the New York Knicks for two games … to the Denver Nuggets for summer league … back to the Westchester Knicks … to China’s Shanghai Sharks … to the Phoenix Suns for six games … to Greece’s Panathinaikos … and back to Shanghai.

And then, in 2021, to a venture capital firm in Utah while living in Denver.

What happened?

“It was different,” says Fredette, who averaged 28.9 points as a senior at BYU and dropped 43 on SDSU that had 22,700 fans in the Marriott Center chanting, “You got Jimmered.”

“It was the first time I wasn’t ‘the man’ on the team. I was low man on the totem pole. Some games I’d play, some games I wouldn’t play at all. That wasn’t easy.”

His relative lack of size (6-foot-2) and length and quickness likely hurt him at the next level. He wasn’t considered an elite defender or rebounder like Leonard, or a role player who could fit around other stars. But his quick release and intergalactic range figured to translate.

It didn’t.

“I think I was a little ahead of my time, where I was shooting from really long ranges in college and it wasn’t really like that in the NBA at that point,” Fredette says. “I came in with that kind of skillset, and if I don’t have the green light to do that, you’re taking away half my skillset. Whereas now, if I came in (to the NBA), I feel like they’d give me a green light to do some of that stuff. It’s just timing and situation.

“I’m not the first guy who’s gone into the NBA and not have happen what they wanted to have happen. It happens to guys every single year, all over the place. It’s the way the sport goes. Some guys make it, some guys don’t.”

Fredette got the green light at Westchester and was named MVP of the All-Star Game with 35 points, six rebounds and eight assists in 25 minutes. He did in Shanghai as well, averaging 37.3, 37.4 and 36.9 points in his first three seasons; one time, he scored 73 points.

The Chinese nicknamed him “Jimo Dashen.” Roughly translated: The Lonely Master.

But then COVID-19 hit, and foreign players in the Chinese Basketball Association were quarantined in their hotels. For seven months.

Fredette had a wife and kids at home. Enough was enough.

“At that point, I said, ‘I can’t do that again,’” he says. “I needed to take a break from basketball and see what happens.”

What happened: He got a call asking if he was interested in trying 3×3.

3×3?

You play halfcourt three-on-three with one sub. The shot clock is 12 seconds, not 24 (NBA) or 30 (college). You get two points for a basket behind the arc, one inside it. Games are to 21 points or whichever team is ahead after 10 minutes. Possession alternates after a made basket, with the other team taking the ball out of the net and clearing it behind the arc.

It is fast, furious, frenetic, less vertical and more horizontal than 5-on-5. The ball screen action is different. It’s hard to play help defense with so much ground to cover and only three players, not wanting to leave someone open behind the arc.

It also helps, Fredette is the first to admit, that the talent level is lower because the 3×3 Olympic qualifying circuit conflicts with most professional league seasons and requires constant international travel. In the last year, he’s been to 15 countries on four continents (Mongolia included), flying coach, driving 40 minutes to find a public park for practice in Kosovo while bribing their Uber driver to wait because there wasn’t any cell signal.

“We call it passport-stamp rich,” Fredette says.

But the Olympics are the Olympics, and Fredette is here.

“You know, I’m happy that he’s able to play 3×3,” Leonard said shortly before being replaced on the U.S. five-on-five Olympic team. “He was a hell of a player back in the day. He pushed us very hard. I wish him the best.”

They were built into rivals by media and fans, and the manufactured enmity spilled over in the waning seconds of the 2011 Mountain West tournament final, an SDSU victory after BYU took both regular-season meetings. The famously stoic Leonard clapped in Fredette’s face. Fredette admitted afterward that “words were exchanged.”

They were reunited on the same roster briefly in the fall of 2015, when Fredette joined Leonard and the San Antonio Spurs for training camp. They got to talking. They found common ground.

“We reminisced about those (college) days,” Fredette says. “He didn’t like talking about it all that much, but he was a great guy. I don’t think anybody knew he would become who he did after college. He’s an amazing athlete, great length, his hands are huge, but he can shoot the ball really well now, where in college it was like, ‘Hey, let’s leave him open a little bit.’

“Credit to him. He went out there and did his thing. He crushed it. Once you get older, you try not to have as much of an ego and you try to be happy for people and what they’ve accomplished. I’ve tried to see that in my life and understand that.”

His teammates in Paris are Canyon Barry, Kareem Maddox and Dylan Travis. Barry, the son of NBA legend Rick Barry, played at College of Charleston and Florida. Maddox played at Princeton before bouncing around low-level European leagues. Travis played Division II ball.

They all found salvation in 3×3. Fredette, the Division I player of the year and an NBA lottery pick, wasn’t too prideful to join them.

They’re considered medal contenders.

“I think it’s the perfect way for him to go out at this stage of his career,” Travis says. “I think he’s always going to be a legend. People know that. For him to get a gold medal would be like a cherry on top and, hopefully, give him some validation.”