Having lots of great players throughout the history of basketball means that some will invariably be overlooked. Take Butch Lee for instance.
He chose Marquette for college but we seem to remember that he strongly considered Duke.
At Marquette he won a national championship as a senior and left a major legacy. Before that though was the Olympics.
At that point, the Olympics only took amateur athletes and Dean Smith coached the team in 1976 and didn’t invite Lee to tryouts (actually we think at that point Smith had a voice but the process went through a cumbersome committee).