Grant Hill: Jaylen Brown to be considered for Team USA at 2028 Olympics after rejection | News, scores, highlights, stats & rumors

Boston Celtics winger and reigning NBA Finals MVP Jaylen Brown is being considered for Team USA for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles after missing out on the roster for this year’s Games in Paris.

Grant Hill, a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame and executive director of the U.S. men’s basketball team who was criticized by Brown after being ignored, spoke about the issue on the program All The Smoke. Open Run with Rachel Nichols.

“I’m confident that at some point he and I will sit down and talk about it and come to some level of understanding,” Hill said. “Look, he’ll be a candidate if he wants to be in ’28…”

Nichols then asked if he would welcome him to the team if the Summer Games moved to LA

“Oh yeah,” Hill said. “One thing I’ve learned. You can’t take anything personal in this role. And so I haven’t personalized anything. My goal, my objective is to win. Once that hopefully happens, we’ll turn around and start looking forward to the future.”

Team USA had a spot open after Los Angeles Clippers star Kawhi Leonard left the team. Brown seemed like a natural fit, especially after shining for a Celtics team that won 80 games (including the playoffs) and won both the Eastern Conference championship and NBA Finals MVP awards. But Celtics guard Derrick White was ultimately called up.

Brown has been critical of Nike in the past, with Matt Dolloff of 98.5 The Sports Hub providing some analysis. He has gone on record saying that he believes Nike, an official partner of Team USA, played a role in his not being a part of the team. The first notable response came via X.

And Brown said a week after the decision to add White that he believed Nike played a role in the rejection, per Jared Weiss and Alex Andrejev from The Athletic: “I definitely do. There’s more to come. I’m not going to comment on it right now.”

Five days later, Brown added this:

“I spoke to (Brown’s) agent. I don’t know if that was before or after things went up on Twitter,” Hill said (h/t Justin Leger from NBC Sports Boston).

“But yeah, I think this idea that there’s a conspiracy theory — I always love a good conspiracy theory, but it was really a basketball decision and these are tough decisions. But having been through this with the FIBA ​​competition, you want to find the right balance and the right pieces on the court that we needed.”

Brown took offense to the conspiracy theory.