A little more than 12 years after he was college basketball’s biggest star, Jimmer Fredette found himself in the back of a vehicle in Kosovo, driven by a man he barely knew, careening 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 didn’t have a place to practice. Then they learned about three public courts that were nestled in the middle of a national park — dotted with graffiti, with cracks in the pavement, but otherwise perfectly serviceable. So off they went.

‘This guy drove us out there, and we’re like, ‘Listen, we’ll give you $100 if you stay here to make sure you don’t leave,’ ‘ Fredette recalled at a media roundtable earlier this year. ‘Because if you leave, we can’t get home.’

Fortunately, Fredette continued, the guy didn’t leave. And it all worked out fine.

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It’s just one of the wild basketball stories he’s amassed — and unique places he’s seen — over the course of a remarkable but unorthodox career.

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

‘You never know where life is going to take you, right?’ Fredette said. ‘For me, it’s just the way that it worked out. There’s no rhyme or reason for it.’

Fredette’s path to Paris has included pit stops on five continents, with tournaments in a far-flung assortment 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 of the countries in both Asia and Europe.

‘We call it passport stamp rich,’ he said with a smile. ‘We’re stamp rich.’

Most basketball fans will remember Fredette, now 35, from his time in college at BYU. He was not just a consensus all-American but also a transformative shooter, becoming a bit 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, in between future NBA all-stars Kemba Walker and Klay Thompson.

Fredette’s time in the NBA, however, did not go as smoothly as theirs. He spent parts of three seasons in Sacramento before getting cut, then moved on to brief stints with Chicago and New Orleans. By 2015, Fredette had dropped into the NBA’s D-League. And by the end of 2016, he had left the U.S. altogether, signing a contract 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 ranges in college, where it wasn’t really like that in the NBA at that point. I came in with that type of skillset, and if I don’t have that type of green light to be able to do that, you’re taking away half of my skillset.’

In China, though, Fredette did have that green light − and he used it. Over his first three seasons with the Sharks, he put up nearly 27 shots per game and averaged more than 37 points, with two games in which he scored 70 or more. Yet after a brief return to the NBA, then to Greece, then back to China during the COVID-19 pandemic, Fredette decided that 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 to the men’s 3×3 basketball program, tasked with helping the program bounce back from its failure to qualify for the Olympics in 2021. He heard that Fredette had stepped away from 5-on-5 basketball and thought 3-on-3 might appeal to him, offering a chance for him 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 child for USA 3×3,’ Fraschilla said in an interview. ‘He has had a great career. He was available because of his retirement. … He’s really perfect for the sport.’

To Fraschilla, it wasn’t just that Fredette is ‘a basketball icon, in many ways,’ but also a terrific shooter who’s in great shape − the type of profile that he thought would translate well to the 3-on-3 game, where teams play to 21 with few breaks.

‘It’s just such a different game,’ Fredette explained. ‘Obviously faster pace, quick shot clock, you have to be in a different type of shape. It’s not as much vertical, sprinting up and down. It’s more horizontal, quick bursts.’

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

He also found that it gave him the sort of balance he was looking for, allowing him to drop his kids off at school, work out and then shift his focus to the venture capital work in the afternoon. He quickly became a key player for Team USA, helping lead the Americans to a Pan American Games title last year and second-place finish in the 2023 FIBA 3×3 World Cup.

‘His talent is such that he’s very much, 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 tremendous lift.’

In return, 3-on-3 basketball gave Fredette a second crack at an opportunity that he thought had long since passed: The Summer Olympics. He knows he’s taken an unorthodox path to Paris. And he acknowledged that his life in basketball has not exactly gone according to plan. Instead of a 15-year career in the NBA, he spent the past year traveling to 15 different countries playing 3-on-3 basketball.

When asked if he envisioned the nomadic lifestyle he now lives, Fredette just said ‘no’ and laughed.

“I’ve had awesome times in my career and I’ve had some tough times in my career – much like many people in their lives, whether it’s in athletics or something else,’ he said. ‘The biggest thing for me is just once a door closes, another one opens. And being able to go all-in on that door.’

Contact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on social media @Tom_Schad.

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