All-time Olympic basketball scoring champ Oscar Schmidt of Brazil was officially announced for induction into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame Monday alongside Rick Pitino, Bernard King, Gary Payton, and UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian.
Schmidt may never have played in the NBA, and didn’t even win an Olympic medal in his five tries between 1980 and 1996. But many believe the Brazilian star’s scoring exploits against the U.S. were partly to blame for the creation of the famous 1992 Barcelona Dream Team.
That’s because Oscar led his national team to an upset of the U.S. on their home soil at the 1987 Pan-Am Games in Indianapolis. That night the legendary Brazilian scored 48 points in a 120-115 gold medal win over a team that included NBA No. 1 overall picks David Robinson, Danny Manning, and Pervis Ellison.
Oscar himself was drafted by the New Jersey in the sixth round of the 1984 draft, but turned down the Nets to instead play in Italy and later Brazil, where he accumulated 49,737 career points.
Oscar earned some amount of fame in 1992 when Charles Barkley was regularly asked about the Brazilian’s scoring. At the time, the future NBA MVP claimed to not be scared of Oscar, and often made fun of the attention he received. But Barkley has since said he has a great deal of respect for Oscar, who scored 24 points as a “35-year-old second stringer” in his game against the Dream Team, and another 26 in 1996.
Oscar still holds the record for most points all-time in the Olympics with 1093, and for most points averaged during an Olympics when he put up 42.3 per game in Seoul. He’s the only player ever to eclipse 1,000 in an Olympic career and was also a seven-time scoring champ in the Italian leagues.
