Grant Hill is the Basketball Hall of Famer with ‘what ifs’ as captivating as his career

In 1997, his fourth year in the NBA, Grant Hill was a small forward with a point guard’s mind. He was a point forward in a world where the point forward was still a novelty.

It took bigger players, like Atlanta’s Tyrone Corbin in the Pistons’ first-round playoff series, to slow Hill down. Corbin would pick him up the entire length of the floor, all game long. No other forwards got that kind of treatment. Not back then.

Most of the time, it didn’t matter. Hill forced his way up the floor. Then he’d cook his man, like when he crossed Corbin over on his way to the rim in Game 2.

It didn’t matter that Dikembe Mutombo rose with him. He was just an extra point at the foul line.

Hill cooked his man on the block, like he did to Corbin in Game 3 of that series.

To complete the trifecta, he also cooked his man by moving the ball, like in Game 3 when Hill crossed Corbin over, again, then whipped pass to a wide open Lindsay Hunter when the defense helped.

There was no answer for Hill, just like there is never an answer for the best players in the game today. That’s what Hill was in 1997 — a superstar synthesis of LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Kawhi Leonard, and more, all in an era before their time.

“I had never seen anything like that,” retired Hawks guard Steve Smith said to Hill in a June 2014 episode of NBA TV’s Open Court. “We played against you guys in the playoffs two or three times, and we were saying, ‘We can’t stop him from getting to the bucket, with Dikembe Mutombo behind us!’ You’re dunking on Dikembe with ease.”

On Friday, Hill will be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, highlighting a class of all-time legends that includes former NBA stars Jason Kidd, Steve Nash, Ray Allen, and Maurice Cheeks. Yet Hill, for reasons outside of his spectacular on-court game, stands apart from the class.

He’s the only player in this Hall of Fame class who you can truly ask the “what if?” question.

If you’re a ‘90s baby like myself, you didn’t get a chance to appreciate Grant Hill in the moment. We were toddlers when the Pistons selected him No. 3 overall behind Glenn Robinson and Jason Kidd in the 1994 draft.

Hill’s prime years were also cut short by a devastating slew of ankle injuries. In the 1999-00 season, he averaged 25.8 points per game. He wouldn’t play a full season for the next eight years.

The obvious what if is to ask, what if Hill never got hurt? But you could also ask several more specific what-ifs.

In a deleted podcast with Jason Whitlock that was transcribed by Piston Powered, Hill says he started having ankle problems at the end of the 1999-00 season. He was still able to go out and play at a high level, all while getting treatment.

“I was missing practice to the point where we had a nationally televised game against Philadelphia and I just pulled myself,” he told Whitlock. “My ankle was just killing me. We get back, we get an MRI. They say it’s a bone bruise.”

Hill missed the last three games of that regular season but returned to the rotation for the Detroit-Miami playoff series. His ankle continued to bother him in Game 1, and he ultimately pulled himself out in the third quarter. The meds were masking his pain, so he was able to play in Game 2.

“I felt a pop in the second quarter, continued on in the third quarter and couldn’t go on,” he said. “When we got back, we found out it was broken.”

What if he didn’t play on that ankle? Kawhi Leonard went through a similar mysterious injury last season, but he only played in nine games because he didn’t trust the San Antonio medical staff’s diagnosis of his quadriceps injury. Instead, he left the team in the middle of a playoff push and rehabbed with an independent set of doctors in New York City.

Leonard is now 100 percent healthy, according to Raptors assistant Phil Handy.

“He’s doing great. He’s in great shape. His body looks good,” Handy told Toronto Talks Sports. “He’s feeling good. He’s moving well, so I don’t anticipate any issues or problems.”

Couldn’t Hill have pulled a Leonard before leaving for Orlando? He probably should have, especially because he was about to become an unrestricted free agent. But he didn’t.

When asked why he didn’t sit out, Hill said he felt he had to live up to a certain standard. In Detroit, that standard was Isiah Thomas, the Hall of Fame point guard who scored 25 points in one quarter on an injured ankle against the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1988 NBA Finals.

What if he left his team, put his own health and best interests first, and only returned to play when he was sure he was 100 percent?

Grant Hill was there.

He made his visit to Orlando in 2000 with Tim Duncan as a pair of superstar free agents, and the two dined with then-Magic head coach Doc Rivers. Duncan was coming off of a season where he averaged 23 points, 12 rebounds, 3.2 assists, and 2.2 blocks per game. Hill was coming off surgery, but he was still an elite player in the league. Those two were set to join high-flying star Tracy McGrady in Orlando, forming a Big 3 in a weak Eastern Conference.

There was just one question Rivers had to answer.

“Someone in Tim’s entourage asked Doc if significant others can travel on the plane,” Hill said on a February 2018 episode of ESPN’s The Jump. “And Doc said no. And the energy at the table [just changed]. And afterwards, my wife said he should have just lied. He should have said yes.”

The camera cut to T-Mac doing a living, breathing, suffering rendition of the My Chest meme.

Sure, Hill was hurt, but having Duncan and McGrady would have given him the cushion to come back when he was 100 percent.

“With Tim Duncan on your team, you would have gotten better real quick,” Rachel Nichols asked.

Hill’s response: “Yes. Exactly.”

Hill spent seven seasons with the Magic, and he never played a full season. He played in only four games in his first season, 14 games his second, and 29 games his third, before missing the entire 2003-04 year after a staph infection ravaged his ankle after surgery.

It was at this moment, he said, that he felt like giving up.

“I had this surgery where I had a skin graf, staph infection the whole bit,” Hill recalled on an episode of NBA TV’s Open Court. “I’m like, ‘Man, what am I doing? I’m done. I don’t wanna play anymore.’ So for like a good year, the year I sat out, I didn’t wanna play anymore.

“But then you get healthy, you start feeling good. You say maybe I can get back out there. We all have played probably when we shouldn’t have played, and I think you do that because you love the game.”

Hill didn’t let those moments of doubt at rock bottom keep him off the court. He returned for the 2004-05 season and averaged nearly 20 points per game. By then, T-Mac had already left town to join Yao Ming in Houston, but the 67 games Hill played that year was validation that he still belonged on the court and could still contribute at the highest level.

Hill spent two more seasons in Orlando, morphing into a serviceable three-point shooter after spending most of his career subpar from downtown. He became a role player after enjoying the spotlight as THE guy in Detroit. He played three consecutive seasons of 80 games or more for the first time since he was 25, and logged real minutes at age 36 to help the Suns make a playoff push.

Through all his ups and downs, he found the happiness and satisfaction that eluded him earlier in his career.

“Just going through all that then coming back, then being a different player, being a role player. I got more satisfaction probably out of that and those experiences than I did prior to that when I was kinda considered an elite player,” Hill said on Open Court. “I think just having an appreciation for being able to do this.”

It’s at this moment in the video Kenny Smith interjected:

“Catch him four years from now,” he said. (Hill retired in 2013, and appeared on this episode in 2014). “He’s still too close to the game. But it’s gonna hit him about four years later and he’s gonna say, man, what if?”

Four years from then is now, and Hill has a lot to look back on. There’s his crossover and dunk on Scottie Pippen, or his absolute poster over Dikembe Mutombo in those same 1997 playoffs. There are his outstanding four years at Duke, where he led the Blue Devils to back-to-back NCAA championships in 1991 and 1992. There’s the injury adversity he ultimately overcame in Orlando before reinventing himself in Phoenix.

Does Grant Hill ever play the what if game? We’ll never know, so instead we play it for him.

In actuality, it doesn’t matter if Hill did anything differently. He’s an NBA Hall of Famer, one of the best of the best. No one can take that away from him.