In the 1994-95 season, Grant Hill averaged 19.9 points, 6.4 rebounds, 5.0 assists, and 1.8 steals per game, and became the first rookie in NBA history to lead All-Star fan balloting. By any reasonable reading of the numbers, that was a dominant debut. Jason Kidd, his co-winner, averaged 11.7 points, 5.4 rebounds, and 7.7 assists. Thirty-one years later, sitting next to Vince Carter and Tracy McGrady, Hill finally said what he has apparently been thinking ever since.
Appearing on the VinceAndTmac show, Hill was asked directly, for what seemed like the first time, how he felt going into the 1995 Rookie of the Year announcement. His answer was immediate. “Yeah, I got robbed. I got robbed. J-Kid knows that, like I got robbed.” He was quick to separate the grievance from the friendship: “That’s my guy. We came in together.” The two share a history that predates the NBA by years. “We were teammates at the Nike camp in high school,” Hill said, before landing the first punchline of the appearance. “I don’t think he passed me the ball one time.”
The Nike camp story frames the entire dynamic. Hill was a rising senior, Kidd a rising sophomore, already the floor general, already distributing exactly as he saw fit, which apparently did not include the future third overall pick standing wide open. “He was a rising sophomore, I’m a rising senior. And he’s supposed to be this point guard, he never passed me the ball at Nike camp.”
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Vince Carter confirmed he had seen Jason Kidd at that stage, “I saw high school J-Kid. He had bounce,” which only deepened the comedy. The injustice, in Hill’s telling, did not stop at the Nike camp. “Then they beat us in the legendary tournament matchup, where Kyle beat us in the second round. I did have a broken toe, I always remind him of that, and that’s why they won.” He then connected the full arc: “He goes one spot ahead of me in the draft, and then I got to share the Rookie of the Year with him. So I’m still a little bitter about that.”
The 1994 NBA Draft saw Kidd go second overall to Dallas and Hill go third to Detroit, with Glenn Robinson going first overall to Milwaukee. All three competed for the Rookie of the Year award that season, and when the votes were counted, it came back a tie between the two, a result Hill admitted caught everyone by surprise. “The idea of sharing that was probably foreign to all of us,” Hill said in a prior interview, noting that the announcement itself came as a shock. The bitterness, clearly, has had three decades to marinate. But Hill has also never lost his perspective on it. “If I got to share it with somebody, it might as well be him,” he conceded. Then, unable to fully let it go: “Go back and look at the stats. That’s all I’m gonna say.”
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The numbers Grant Hill is pointing to do not require much excavation. Hill’s rookie season, 19.9 points, 6.4 rebounds, 5.0 assists, 1.8 steals on 47.6% shooting, was one of the most complete debut campaigns the league had seen from a forward in years. Jason Kidd’s 11.7 points, 7.7 assists, and league-leading triple-doubles made the statistical case from a different angle, a point guard who immediately transformed the Dallas Mavericks from a 13-win team the year before his arrival into a 36-win side, a 23-game turnaround that carried its own weight with voters. Whether one deserved it outright over the other is a legitimate debate. Hill’s position is clear: he deserved it outright, and he has been making that case quietly, and now very publicly, ever since.
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What the bitterness cannot obscure is the arc of a relationship that has outlasted most of the friendships formed across that era. Both Hill and Kidd were inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2018. Both retired in the same year, 2013, within days of each other. And both have remained connected through the decades that followed their playing careers, the kind of bond that only forms between two people who shared something defining at the exact same moment.
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Hill’s “I got robbed” is not genuine resentment; it is the language of someone who has told the same story enough times to know exactly how it plays. Jason Kidd, for his part, has listed the co-Rookie of the Year as one of the highlights of his career, which, given that his career also includes a championship, two Finals appearances, and two Olympic gold medals, probably does not soothe Hill’s feelings even slightly. “Go back and look at the stats.” He is still going to be saying that in another thirty years.
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