Years ago, Victor Oladipo emerged in the NBA as an entertaining and explosive player: dangerous in attack, tenacious in defence and driven by a work ethic that eventually earned him two All-Star selections. Now 34 and more than three years removed from his last game in the league, the guard has written a letter in ‘The Players’ Tribune’ addressed to those who can still offer him a contract. He does not know how the journey will end: “Maybe a team out there will give me a chance. Maybe no team will.” He retains only one certainty about his relationship with basketball: “From the first page to the last, it’s a love story.”
Before reaching that point, Oladipo had spent countless nights training alone because he understood that it was necessary if he was ever to reach an NBA that then seemed far away. He was not ranked among the top 100 prospects in his class and was not selected as a McDonald’s All-American. He started only five games during his first year at Indiana University, but continued entering Cook Hall at night and eventually became a college ‘All-American’ before Orlando Magic selected him with the second pick of the 2013 draft. He still remembers those who mocked the limitations of his offensive game and the reporter who described him as “just an athlete” when asked whether he could become a professional. He also remembers building his own hoop and accidentally making it nine feet high. “I think about all of that,” he writes.
A career still searching for its place
His first years in Orlando became a succession of adjustments. Oladipo had played as a power forward for part of his high-school career and only moved permanently into the backcourt at university, where he had not regularly operated as a point guard either. The Magic nevertheless put the ball in his hands at the beginning of his professional career. “When Orlando put me at the point as soon as I entered the NBA, it was almost like an adjustment on top of an adjustment,” he explains. The franchise repeatedly changed coaches and direction without fully defining the role in which he could develop all his qualities. The arrival of Frank Vogel in 2016 appeared to offer the possibility of a different chapter, but Oladipo was traded to Oklahoma before playing a single game under him.
At Oklahoma City Thunder, he joined a stronger team, although it was still not the ideal context in which to assume the responsibility he needed. The ball and the main offensive burden belonged to Russell Westbrook, who completed his historic triple-double season and was named the league’s Most Valuable Player. Injuries prevented Oladipo from showing his best form, but he turned his time alongside the point guard into another learning experience: “I learned a lot from playing with Russ during his MVP year. He is such a special player and person.” At the end of the season, Oladipo moved to Miami to transform his body and his game. Thunder coach Billy Donovan even travelled there to see his work, although another change was already approaching.
The summer that changed his career
Oladipo reorganised his training, changed his diet, worked out twice a day and sought advice from Dwyane Wade, visiting him at home to discuss patience, mentality and how to build a career. The plan was not simply about gaining strength or losing weight: he worked on stopping, changing direction, attacking the basket, operating in the pick-and-roll and responding to different defensive schemes. It was an extension of the same discipline that had taken him from those late-night sessions in Indiana to the NBA. “I invested in myself. I invested in my time, my body and my mind,” he would later say about that summer.
The results of that work were beginning to emerge when Oklahoma included him and Domantas Sabonis in the trade for Paul George. It was the second time the two players had been moved together, and Oladipo sought reassurance from his team-mate. His mother asked him another difficult question: why was he being traded again? He tried to explain that these were part of basketball and its business, although he felt that two franchises had given up on him before discovering everything he could offer. The destination made this move different. Indiana was not only a return to the state where he had developed as a player; it was also the first team to make him feel clearly wanted. During his first five years in the NBA, he had played under five coaches and been traded twice. At last, he was finding continuity, responsibility and somewhere that felt like his own.
Indiana, where everything fell into place
His first season with the Indiana Pacers provided confirmation. Oladipo became an All-Star and won the Most Improved Player award, while also earning selection to the All-NBA Third Team and NBA All-Defensive First Team and leading the league in steals. The Pacers won 48 games and took the Cleveland Cavaliers of LeBron James to Game 7 of their first-round play-off series. “What can I even say? It was perfect,” he recalls. “It was as if they had a job opening with great responsibility but also a great opportunity, and I was exactly the right candidate with exactly the right experience.” At the 2018 All-Star Game, something else happened that he had waited for throughout his life: his father watched him play in person for the first time.
Oladipo returned to Miami during the off-season to continue working with the same trainer. That version of him had not appeared suddenly, but after years spent improving an offensive game that many had considered too limited. Indiana added the element he had still been missing: the feeling of being valued. “I’m an emotional player, and that’s something I take a lot of pride in. I feed off connection and energy,” he explains. “Indiana showing me love and treating me as one of its own played a real part in the level I was able to reach there.” He was selected as an All-Star for a second time in 2019 and appeared finally to have found the stability needed to maintain that form or perhaps improve further. “Unfortunately, it couldn’t last forever.”
Three operations and another mountain to climb
In January 2019, he ruptured the quadriceps tendon in his right knee. He spent a year away, returned while still restricted and played through pain that he later compared to knives piercing his leg. After a spell in Houston —where he averaged more than 20 points across 20 games— and a move to Miami, he required a second operation on the same tendon in 2021. As he attempted to rebuild his career again with the Miami Heat, another injury altered its course: he tore the patellar tendon in his left knee during the 2023 play-offs. After the initial rupture in 2019, he managed only 60 regular-season appearances over the following three campaigns. “For the last three years, that’s what I’ve been doing. It has taken a huge amount of work: in rehabilitation, in the gym and, to be completely honest, in therapy as well.”
He is not now promising to recreate exactly the Oladipo who played in Indiana. He wants to prove that a different version exists, rebuilt through operations, rehabilitation and his time away from the NBA. He has returned to competition in the NBA G League and worked out in front of representatives from several franchises, but the central argument in his letter is not a statistic. It is the example he wants to set for his daughter, Naomi: “The version of her dad who was knocked all the way down the mountain, spent years trying to climb back up and was knocked down again and again, but never stopped climbing.” He then addresses any general manager willing to listen: “I believe my body is finally right. I believe I still have excellent and, more importantly, winning basketball ahead of me. I believe I can bring value to an NBA locker room. All I am asking for now is an opportunity to prove it.” He is not demanding that somebody change the ending of his story; he is asking for the chance to write it.
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