Back in 2021, Hall of Famer Grant Hill was named the managing director of USA Basketball.
Before that, however, Hill apparently told Miami Heat legend Dwyane Wade that he should take the job. Wade wasn’t really interested at all in the position.
“I kind of casually said to him, ‘You’ve been on the Olympic team, and you’re relevant, you should consider taking the job,’” Hill revealed to Joe Vardon of The Athletic. “He looked at me like that was the craziest, most foolish suggestion I could ever share.”
The topic apparently didn’t come up again between Hill and Wade.
“Hill and Wade laughed it off, and the topic never came up again between them,” Vardon wrote. “But the words Hill said to Wade were applicable to himself.”
Hill wound up thinking about what he had told Wade, and he later ended up volunteering to take the position. He was reportedly the only candidate interviewed for the job.
“It was like, forget about Dwyane, I could do this,” Hill recalled. “I wanted to do this. It would be fun, it would be an incredible challenge and an incredible opportunity. So that really sort of planted the seed.”
It certainly would have been interesting to see Wade as the managing director of USA Basketball. He has lots of history with Team USA, having participated in the 2004 and 2008 Olympics.
In the 2008 Olympics, he was Team USA’s leading scorer, averaging 16.0 points and 4.0 rebounds per game while shooting 67.1 percent from the field and 47.1 percent from beyond the arc. That team dominated its competition en route to a gold medal. Former Heat stars LeBron James and Chris Bosh were among the many talented players on that squad.
As for Hill, he also won a gold medal with Team USA. He averaged 9.7 points per game during the 1996 Olympics, during which Team USA went 8-0.
Nowadays, Wade is surely more focused on his duties with the Utah Jazz, who currently sit in fourth place in the Western Conference with a 43-26 record.