A Non-Shooter's Take on the Ben Simmons Saga
Wants to be "the man" on his own team, but only as long as that doesn't require him to step up his game at all.
Ben Simmons does not care about basketball, or at least not nearly as much as basketball fans seem to care about him.
A multi-millionaire club basketball player is stuck in a staring contest stalemate with a billionaire basketball club owner and some multi-millionaire executives and coaches. He’s vowed never to play another game for the Philadelphia 76ers, because guys who are anointed “future face of the league” tend to get what they want even when they might not deserve it.
Ben Simmons cannot shoot a basketball. He is a phenomenal defender and playmaker, but he cannot shoot a basketball. As far as any of us are aware, he’s never been able to, and seems to have minimal interest in addressing the matter. But he wants his own team and, as seems to be the mission-statement of his career, he’s prepared to do pretty much nothing to make that happen.
So, here’s the deal: on some level, I might be Ben Simmons’ biggest sympathiser.
Ben Simmons does not believe in his ability to shoot the basketball. Judging by his free-throw numbers, that is entirely justifiable. He can not and/or will not shoot the ball like a professional basketball player is expected to. He ducks opportunities, passes up looks, and deflects questions about it. For a long time, I really did feel like I understood, always thinking that I couldn’t imagine anything more exhausting than being questioned about the one hole in your game when you were undeniably good-to-great at everything else.
As of today, it’s just a little over 18 months since I last touched a basketball. It is also exactly two years to the day since I acknowledged that wheelchair basketball couldn’t be my career plan anymore. I was 15 when I decided that, come hell or high water, my future job title would be “professional wheelchair basketball player”, and 18 when I made that happen for the first and only time. So why was it that, at 25, I was calling it a day?
Over those 10 years I never, ever figured out how to shoot a basketball. I couldn’t get it right. I knew it and I played like I knew it. Despite how I continued to insist that I was good at other elements of the game in a way that could help my team, being a complete non-entity with the basketball in my hands held my game back, and I didn’t make any meaningful improvement as a player for at least 6 years.
I’m not writing this bit for any sympathy, but more to say that I believe I have my credentials in the “Let Him Shoot!” Hall of Fame, and so I feel like I have at least some grounds on which to discuss the other members.
On this front, I sympathise with Ben Simmons. I am aware that there are some very apparent and, frankly, stratospheric differences between us in terms of athletic ability and natural basketball talent, but we have at least one similarity. Knowing that you can’t trust yourself to shoot the ball and that everyone else knows it means that everybody on the floor plays with that in mind. It ate away at me for a long time, and I had precisely 0% of the scrutiny that that guy deals with.
So, here’s the bit I don’t quite get: my struggles with shooting a basketball and a lack of self-confidence lead me to look in the mirror and say “stop messing around and get on with your life”, Ben Simmons’ similar existential crisis lead him to say to his mirror-self “what I need is a team that’s all about me”.
I’m sure there are self-help books and motivational speakers who will tell you that Simmons’ response to the problem is closer to how you’re supposed to confront your demons. They may well be right, and I’m not for a second suggesting that me acknowledging that I could no longer face playing basketball is the correct response for anyone else, or even for me. That said, Simmons insisting that the root of his basketball unhappiness doesn’t lie with him shows a pretty startling lack of self-awareness from a guy who you could argue has been overly self-aware to the point of letting his own insecurities about his game prevent him from progressing.
When Ben Simmons demanded a trade from Philadelphia, I think it showed who he truly is and, when you look back at what we’ve seen from him since he entered the NBA, who he is makes complete logical sense.
This is a guy who was drafted #1 overall by the 76ers, despite the shooting flaws that were beyond apparent in his game even then. He won a controversial Rookie of the Year award while not being a true rookie. His team’s General Manager, Elton Brand, was on record as saying that giving Ben the maximum rookie extension ($168,000,000) “would not even need to be a conversation”, even given that none of the flaws in his game had seen any improvement. He was a crucial part of Philly’s collapse in the playoffs against Atlanta, and then was photographed kissing Maya Jama at Wimbledon a couple of weeks later.
Given the track record, you kind of can’t blame him for assuming that everything simply defaults to working out flawlessly at all times.
As a result, he’s decided that playing for the Sixers doesn’t suit him anymore and that he wants to take his particular set of skills to somewhere that maximises him as a player. He wants this, despite the fact that the contract agreed between him and his current team should see him being compensated ~$140mil to play for them between now and 2025.
He’s demanded a trade and informed his current employer that he doesn’t intend to show up to work anymore and that they can withhold his paychecks if they so choose. Not many people in the world would consider threatening this power move, much less actually follow through on the threat. Maybe Simmons believes that it’s worth the short-term financial loss in order to secure himself a situation where he’s happier (i.e. an organisation where he is the focal point). The alternative viewpoint on this hold-out is an already-financially-secure young man willing to push the boundaries of unprofessional conduct until the point where he’s no longer worth the trouble.
With Simmons’ apparent willingness to not see a basketball court again until it’s entirely on his terms, the bit that I can’t get my head around is that, during one of these meetings, he told the team that it “wasn’t his job to increase his trade value”.
Essentially, he wants Philadelphia to trade him to somewhere that he’d like to play (he’s apparently set on California, as long as it’s not Sacramento), and won’t play while they’re making that happen. The problem is that nobody is queueing up to trade any real assets for a guy who’s too scared to try and throw balled-up tissue-paper in the bin, and so the Sixers have nowhere to trade him to. One thing he could do is get out on the floor and play well enough that he becomes desirable to other teams, but he has explicitly stated that he considers that to be outside his remit.
However you try and slice it, none of this is the behaviour of a guy who loves basketball. For someone who got the yips at the prospect of completing a dunk in the playoffs, the confidence he has that some team will make the move to bring him in is nothing short of remarkable. One thing I also find quite compelling is that, for all the rumours and hearsay about the conversations around his trade request, he has at no point been reported to have pulled out the typical line of “I want to play for a title contender”. Whatever team decides to swing a trade for him will almost certainly be worse than the 76ers are (with or without him), but the general idea seems to be that he’s fine with that as long as he gets to run the show.
To quote me from a minute ago: none of this is the behaviour of a guy who loves basketball.
Maybe I’m just salty because no amount of missed free-throws ever gave me a realistic shot with Maya Jama, but seeing Ben Simmons be convinced that the current state of his game isn’t the problem is truly baffling to me. I would not for a second attempt to take away what a great defender he is, but you also can’t rely on that when you play a sport in which everybody absolutely has to partake on both sides of the ball. Most basketball players are better at either offense or defense, and it’s usually enough to balance out any shortcomings on their weaker end, but it just doesn’t work when the imbalance is as obvious as it is with Ben Simmons.
Ben Simmons’ game is like the blinds in our spare room. They’re a shade of pink that I don’t understand the appeal of and are thin enough that they don’t stop any light from coming in. The purpose of blinds is to give you control over when the room is lighter or darker. That means that, whenever one of our quasi-homeless friends points out that they don’t keep our spare room dark past about 4:30am, I can’t really argue back by pointing out how light the room is during the day.
Simmons has ridden some combination of preposterous natural talent and minimal viable work ethic to where he is now. Now, he wants to be on a team that maximises him as an individual. Call me a purist, but I struggle with the idea that you can be put in a situation that maximises you when you haven’t even truly attempted to minimise a universally-recognised weakness in your game.
If Ben Simmons gets traded away from Philadelphia and lands on a team that is built to enhance his skillset, don’t be surprised when that skillset never progresses beyond what it is when he gets there.