Other teams won’t be fooled by Simmons charade
The next-to-last significant play Ben Simmons made as a 76er was to not attempt a late-playoffgame dunk, a blast of basketball selfishness so astonishing that he was removed from the game, booed by a crowd no longer willing to buy the hype and generally ripped afterward by Joel Embiid.
The last one was another decision with zero regard for anything beyond his own professional addiction to praise. That came this week when, according to credible reports, Simmons decided he no longer had interest in taking another shot for the Sixers at all, even if he does have four years remaining on his contract.
On brand, as the club likes to say.
Aware that for nearly a calendar year he has been on Daryl Morey’s yard-sale table and has received as much interest as a dusty stack of 20-year-old DVDs, it has come to Simmons’ attention in recent weeks that the rest of the planet doesn’t believe he is much of a winning basketball player. Who’d have guessed?
Simmons will never accept that, of course, for ever since he was able to overwhelm inferior players in Australia, he has been buffered by support groups convincing him he was a basketball superstar.
He was told that at LSU, where he played for one year, attempted three (college-line) 3-pointers, didn’t make the NCAA Tournament and shot 4-for11 in his final game, a tidy 71-38 loss to Texas A&M.
He was told that by the Sixers, and specifically former coach Brett Brown, who had backed themselves into over-hyping the results of a shameful lose-to-win-draft-picks scheme and had just enough dopey cult members volunteering to nod along.
He was told that by Morey last fall, the new general manager throw
ing the phrase around in an attempt to inflate the value of the flawed player he would try to sneak into Houston in exchange for a real superstar, James Harden.
It was all Simmons heard all of last season, when Doc Rivers kept badgering the customers that they should celebrate (his verb) a player unwilling to shoot from 10 feet and who had been consistently diminished in advanced playoff rounds against good coaches and healthy rosters.
Like anything in sales, though, the market eventually will scream. That’s what happened when the Sixers spent a summer making it plain Simmons was available, only to have many of their text messages swiped left.
Believing he had fooled the rest of the equally qualified personnel types in his industry, Morey began with comical demands for Simmons, including multiple first-round picks and scoops of talented players. Even when there may have been some reasonable options — would Cleveland have parted with Collin Sexton? — Morey would continue to bluff. He claimed he wanted superstar value for his superstar.
One problem: He had one superstar, and it wasn’t Simmons, a point forward with plus-courtawareness whose primary talent is to charge baseline-to-baseline with entertaining haste, occasionally blast to the basket past some inferior defenders and score just enough to move him closer to his next tripledouble.
Even if it’s an asinine achievement that attempts to prove a player with 10 points, 10 rebounds and 10 assists somehow had a better game than the one with 36 points, 10 rebounds and nine assists, Simmons long has bathed in triple-double-consciousness. It was his way to deflect what everyone else was seeing, which was that he was an impediment to offensive flow.
Not enough general managers, though were tricked. And when August became September, the prospect haunted that Simmons would have to return to Camden, where he would be made to discuss that layup that never was, Embiid’s ensuing critique and why he was so brushed off in the trade market. Simmons was no more interested in confronting that than attempting a dunk in a playoff game when he may have been fouled and made to take a walk of shame to the freethrow line, where his imprecision had become a league-wide chorus of cackles.
And that’s when it dropped that he was unwilling to return to a team that didn’t want him anyway. Perfect.
For a 25-year-old starter on the team that just was the best in the Eastern Conference in the regular season, Morey will have takers for Simmons. There will always be a coach convinced of his ability to create a superstar. Coaches in any sport can be delusional that way.
But Morey is adept enough at his profession to have prepared for the reality that his over-sell wouldn’t work. So he’ll have a Plan B. Maybe he can land C.J. McCollum, who is a better player than Simmons, even if he is not as often called a superstar. There are three-team trades to concoct. Agents will be involved, helping to make it all work. It’s going to happen.
Until then, all that is clear with less than a month before training camp is that Simmons has made his last play as a 76er.
It was a selfish one, too, believe it or not.