Simmons can give Sixers title shot ... if he keeps shooting

Doc Rivers coached the 2010 Boston Celtics, whose point guard made 17 threepoint shots all season, missed 63, and heard night after night about how he couldn’t shoot.

How’d that turn out?

“Won a title,” Rivers said.

Rivers coaches the Los Angeles Clippers, who fell to the Sixers, 122-113, Thursday, on a night when Ben Simmons finally consented to shoot from more than three feet. He remembered how his point guard, Rajon Rondo, once had a similar reluctance to shoot in 2010, but remembered more fondly how he led the NBA that season in steals and had 794 assists and played in his first of four consecutive All-Star Games.

“So clearly you can win with a guy like Ben Simmons on your basketball team,” Rivers said. “He’s similar to Rondo in the fact that he has the IQ to do it. He’s a smart player. He’s much bigger, obviously. So I wouldn’t worry about it.

“We didn’t have a problem scoring. We didn’t have a problem defending. Rondo was great when he wasn’t on the ball. He was a great cutter and a great mover. And I’m assuming that’s what Ben is or is going to be.”

Rivers had been dragged into the pre-game conversation, and always will have an answer. But he doesn’t have to worry about Simmons. That’s Brett Brown’s job. And it was a job Brown had taken even more seriously after a disturbing Tuesday loss in Toronto when Simmons would not, could not shoot, and turned the ball over 11 times.

There may not have been a connection. But the more Simmons tried to create offense in tighter spaces because of his reluctance to create it in open spaces, the more unlikely he seemed to be able to make the Sixers enjoy a season like those 2010 Celtics.

So Brown not only made it a point to ask for more from Simmons in private, he was quick Thursday to share it in public. He knows, as everyone knows, that at some point championship-level NBA point guards must attempt outside shots. So he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

“I wished he would use it more,” Brown said. “We talked a little bit about it in the pregame. I wished he would use it more. At times you get to the paint and you have your choice of taking a right-handed or left-handed longer jumper, like eight, 10-foot jump-hooks or runners. I would like to see him come to a gather-step, a jump stop and just shoot over people.

“He’s big enough. Obviously, he’s not going to get his shot blocked.”

Brown has talked about that for the three years Simmons has been with the Sixers. He expected Simmons to return from the last offseason better able to shoot from distance than he did as a rookie, when he took 11 total three pointers and clanked every one. By Thursday, though, Brown would throw it out there for all to hear. Simmons heard it, too. So he hit a 10-foot fade-away jumper within the first minute, then deposited a couple of 11-foot driving hook shots in the second quarter. He also took a first-half jumper from around the freethrow line that looked like an airball, though it might have gotten a small piece of the rim. Nor was that the point. The point was that he took shots from more than 10 inches from the net, even acknowledging that Brown’s pregame counsel might have yielded that effect.

“A little,” he said. “It was also just me taking them, taking what they gave me.”

That’s the way he wanted to play it, and that was fine with Brown, who grinned afterward when reminded that Simmons finally took some outside shots, even if they were only of the twopoint variety.

“I think at times, those long jump-hooks, although he made some of those tonight, might be better displaced with a two-foot, rise-up jump shot,” Brown said. “It’s so easy for us to sit here and say, ‘He would have, he should have.’ He’s an NBA player. And he feels the game. And I have said this and I will double-down on it, it is going to come, but it is going to come on his terms.

“We put in the work. We encourage it. We promote it. And as his career plays out in front of this city, I think you’ll see it on a more frequent basis.”

The Sixers were able to pull the Clippers into a free-flowing game, allowing both Simmons and backup point guard Markelle Fultz to excel. Simmons finished with 14 points, 11 assists and nine fewer turnovers than he had in Toronto. Fultz had 12 points, five feeds and one turnover. And while neither shot from outside with any consistency or style, it did show what Rivers suggested: It is possible to win with point guards who don’t have much urge or ability to shoot from distance. But win championships? “I don’t mean to be a wise guy, but it comes with age and experience,” Brown said of Fultz, but also of Simmons. “When you have a taste of success, you are able to sell it and say it a lot easier. It’s like Ben’s jump shot. I think this completely, it’s what I have learned after all these years coaching basketball: With a little bit of success, there can be more expected.”

Until then, Brown will keep wishing. And somewhere, a onetime championship coach will have a feeling that it all might work.