Paul George has officially accepted an invitation to be on USA Basketball’s Olympic Team, a league sourced confirmed to VigilantSports.com.
In his Team USA uniform, George will be on limited-edition bottles of Gatorade this summer.
It has long been a dream of George to represent his country and win a gold medal, and here he’ll get that chance two years after suffering a crushing injury that kept him out for all but six games during the 2014-15 NBA season.
“The last thing I’ll do is let [his previous injury] keep me from making a dream happen,” George said last summer. “No hard feelings towards none of the situation. It’s part of the game.
“I still have … dreams of lifting that gold medal. That’s definitely a motivation.”
This all appeared to be a foregone conclusion, especially after several big announcements already this month.
- June 1: NBA2K announced that he would be on the cover for its Standard Edition of NBA2K17.
- June 3: Jeep kicked off a summer campaign with George as the face of it.
- June 14: Gatorade announced that George would be one of five Olympic athletes to appear on limited-edition bottles and appear in a new ad campaign.
USA Basketball training camp runs July 18-22 in Las Vegas and then they’ll play exhibition games in three more states, including Illinois, before heading to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for the Olympic Games: August 6-21.
“As I told Paul, he has to listen to his body,” McMillan said last week on our Pacers Podcast, exactly one month since being promoted to head coach.
“He has to listen to those doctors and make a smart decision. The games that he will be playing in, the Olympic committee and the coaching staff and all of those guys, they want to make sure that they’re not putting these guys in harms way.
“… They have the plan in place to make sure that those players are prepared to win gold, but they will also have time to recover and have themselves ready to represent their organization.”
See Also: Paul George in goodbye post to George Hill: ‘We created a bond you can’t break‘
Marc Spears of The Undefeated first reported that George had accepted an invite.
UPDATE: June 24, 12:30 a.m. ET
Pacers General Manager Kevin Pritchard shares the front office’s take on George accepting an invite.