What If Wednesday: Oscar Schmidt in the NBA

Among the most commonly discussed topics emanating from the 1988 Seoul Olympics focuses on the prospects of a young, pre-injury history Arvdyas Sabonis coming stateside to the NBA — and with good reason.

The Lithuanian big man dominated in his final Olympic Games with the Soviet Union, but Cold War friction between the USSR and United States prevented Sabonis from making the move to the sport’s top league. His style before a series of injuries slowed him down has reached almost Paul Bunyan levels of mythology, described as someone who had the court IQ of Hakeem Olajuwon and explosiveness of early-career David Robinson.

In that same Olympic tournament, however, starred another international player who, unlike Sabonis, never suited up in the NBA; not at his peak, not as a prospect, not in the twilight of his career. And that makes the all-time leading scorer in Olympic history, Brazilian guard Oscar Schmidt, perhaps the most fascinating what-if in global basketball history.

Schmidt played in five Olympics from 1980 through 1996, totaling 1,093 points in 38 games for a 28.8-per game average. While Schmidt’s longevity contributes to his Herculean point totals, compare his production to that of Carmelo Anthony. At the ‘16 Games in Schmidt’s native Brazil, Carmelo became the all-time leading scorer in Team USA history; he has 763 fewer Olympic points than Oscar Schmidt.

At Seoul in 1988, Schmidt’s scoring prowess elevated from impressive — 24.1 points per game in each of the 1980 Moscow and 1984 Los Angeles Games, the two lowest averages of his Olympic career — to a staggering 42.3 per game in ‘88.

His output in South Korea included a 55-point performance against a Spanish national team that included Jordi Villacampa, a three-time FIBA All-European selection who perhaps could have played in the NBA in his own right.

The 55 points remain the Olympic record, though are only the second-most important scoring burst of Schmidt’s international career. A year earlier in the Gold Medal round of the Pan-American Games, Schmidt torched a Team USA squad made up of college all-stars for 47 points.

The American loss in Indianapolis to Schmidt’s team of Brazilian pros began turning the wheels for the formation of the Dream Team, the United States’ first-ever Olympic squad made up mostly of NBA players.

“To know that we changed the world is something I’ll never forget,” Schmidt told Rick Dorsey of The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina) ahead of the prolific scorer’s Olympic swan song in the ‘96 Atlanta Games.

Oscar Schmidt changed the world from American soil once. Could he have done so over the course of 82 games, the duration of an NBA season?

“I think I can play anywhere,” Schmidt said in a Knight-Ridder wire feature from the ‘88 Olympics. “Maybe not like a star. Not like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. But I think I can play in the NBA.

“Basketball is basketball anywhere,” he added.

While true, the nature of the game was far more compartmentalized then, particularly in America. Before 1988, international players rarely came to the NBA. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 symbolically opened a flood gate, or at least offered a real-world allegory for the game’s globalization, as that was the same year Drazen Petrovic and Šarūnas Marčiulionis made their debuts.

Schmidt was actually drafted five years prior in 1984, taken with the New Jersey Nets’ Round 6 pick.

Round 6 isn’t exactly the most ardent foreshadowing of a player making a roster, though, and the NBA having not yet caught onto the value of international prospects certainly gives the impression this was a throwaway pick.

Once the 1989-90 campaign arrived, Schmidt was 10 years removed from the professional game that put him on the world stage: a 42-point eruption in the 1979 International Cup competition between EuroLeague champion Bosna Sarajevo and Schdmit’s Brazilian Sirio de Sao Paulo club.

EuroLeague.net has a fascinating retrospective on the young Schmidt’s breakout.

A decade scoring at such a prolific rate had Schmidt with plenty of miles on his 30 years old body — a considerably advanced stage into a career in that era of professional basketball.

Consider that Larry Bird, someone to whom Schmidt drew comparisons and whose rookie year coincided with Schmidt’s International Cup star turn, was fast winding down in ‘89 after the rigors of nine straight seasons playing at least 74 regular-season games and six Playoffs with at least 17 outings.

A similar grind in the NBA would have prevented Schmidt from contributing where it most mattered to him, as he explained in an interview with the Olympic Channel last spring:

The reason I never played in the NBA, was that as I started to get older, you must run fast every game and I just said no. The change in rules came too late in my career. Before that the most important thing for me was playing in for my country, so I refused all NBA advances. I have no regrets and I would still do the same thing now if the rules were still the same.

With the health regimens players adhere to today, Schmidt would perhaps be able to balance representing his home Brazil with an NBA career. What’s more, I have no doubt if I were to transport 1980s Oscar Schmidt to today’s NBA via time machine, his style would make him a weapon for virtually any team.

Schmidt was making more 3-pointers in a single game than some of the NBA shooters of the late ‘80s attempted in a month, and he exuded an attitude prevalent in current front offices.

“Three points are better than two, you know,” he quipped to The N&O back in 1996.

So if Schmidt helped change the basketball world in 1987 by forcing America’s hand on pro players in international competitions, could he have changed the game ushering in the analytic-minded approach to threes almost 30 years before the Golden State Splash Bros?

Say he joined the Nets, or another organization, immediately after his Pan-Am Games heroics. In that 1987-88 campaign, Larry Bird was fourth in the NBA with 98 made 3-pointers; teammate Danny Ainge led the league with 148 made on 357 attempts. Michael Adams was the only player to shoot more at 379, or 4.6 per game.

Schmidt attempted 7.9 3-pointers per game in the Seoul Olympics, and more than nine per in the ‘92 Barcelona Games.

There’s a chapter in the outstanding cyberpunk comic series Transmetropolitan that follows a segment of society known as “The Revivals.” These are people who were cryogenically frozen and reanimated decades later, but because of societal and technological changes, were quite literally incapable of processing their new world. The Revivals were sent to refugee camps of sorts to live antiquated lives, like a less insidious version of that terrible M. Night Shyamalan film, The Village.

A shooter in 1987 given the kind of green light Schmidt had from beyond the arc would have either turned players and coaches of the time into the Basketball Revivals, or landed Schmidt’s coach on the unemployment quickly.