Grant Hill is why the Hall of Fame exists

At base, halls of fame are museums. They are — or should be, anyway — places where we look, read, listen and think. Where we can remember things long since forgotten, and maybe, if we’re lucky, learn something new about the games we love, and the people and moments that shaped them.

That’s why it matters that Grant Hill will be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on Friday night. Because while it’s been five years since he last suited up, it’s been damn near 20 since we last saw Grant Hill the way he was meant to be seen.

“I don’t know,”Hill recently told Sekou Smith of NBA.com. “Some of these kids were born after I was healthy in Detroit, and it’s crazy.”

You can forget a lot in two decades, and those losses accrue and accelerate as the years fly by. We owe it to basketball lovers present and future to make sure we don’t ever lose

Few players in the history of the sport have ever been as good at virtually everything as Hill was when he came out of Duke as the third overall pick in the 1994 NBA draft, with two NCAA titles, a pair of AllAmerica selections and an ACC Player of the Year nod already on his résumé. The complete list of players to roll up more than 9,000 points, 3,000 rebounds, 2,500 assists, 500 steals and 200 blocks through their first six NBA seasons is three names long: LeBron James, Larry Bird and Grant Hill.

If you knock out the steals and blocks, you get one more name. It’s Oscar Robertson. That’s fitting. We now live in an era in which the tripledoubles Oscar made famous are downright commonplace, but Hill still ranks 11th on the all-time list, according to Basket bal l -Refer ence.com, with 29 … all of which came between April 1995 and March 1999.

Hill wasn’t the physical specimen James is, and he couldn’t shoot the ball like Larry Legend, and he couldn’t set the table like the Big O. But he was a plug-and-play All-Star from Day 1. The first time Hill took the floor as a member of the Detroit Pistons, he scored 25 points, grabbed 10 rebounds, dished five assists and blocked three shots against the Los Angeles Lakers, kicking off a stretch of seven straight 20point outings to start his car eer.

He was an instant sensation, the first rookie in NBA history to lead the way in All-Star voting. That ensured him a spot in the East’s starting lineup in the 1995 NBA All-Star Game alongside three future Hall of Famers: Reggie Miller, Scottie Pippen and Shaquille O’Neal.

Rounding out the starting five: Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway, a player with whom Hill would sadly come to share more than an All-Star sl ot .

“There aren’t many people who get anointed to carry the crown of being the face of the league,” former Pistons legend and Hall of Fame guard Isiah Thomas told NBA.com’s Smith. “And when Grant Hill came in, he was basically anointed by the league, players and everyone, he was anointed to be the next face of the league.”

Despite Hill’s instant ascent, the Pistons still struggled in his rookie season, going 28-54 and finishing well out of playoff contention. But in Hill, they’d found the rarest thing in the sport — a bona fide superstar who could lift them out of the doldrums of life after “The Bad Boys.”

The next season, with Doug Collins on the bench and Allan Houston riding shotgun, Hill led the Pistons in points, rebounds, assists and steals; Detroit won 46 games and made the playoffs. One year later, after Hill had won Olympic gold with Team USA at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, he again led the Pistons in all four of those statistical categories, and also led them to a 54-28 record, finishing third in MVP voting, behind only Karl Malone and Michael Jordan.

The Pistons bowed out in the opening round of the playoffs in both of those seasons, but their time was coming, because they had what every great team needed. Hill was special: a versatile 6-foot-8 all-court playmaker with few equals, one of the game’s premier point forwards, the kind of player bound by nothing. And everybody knew it.

“When you’re coming from another team, you always ask yourself, ‘Is this guy really that good?

Or is he all hype because he’s the next guy coming?’” said former teammate

Grant Long during a recent interview with James

L. Edwards III of The Athletic. “When I got to Detroit and began to practice with the team and watched him in the game and played with him, I realized he was really that good [… ] People always brought up Scottie Pippen and his versatility and I always said, ‘Bar none, Grant was the best small forward in the game when I was playing.’”