Rivers commits to tutoring plan with Simmons
On schedule, on time and on eternal 76ers demand, Doc Rivers Monday officially began the fifth annual Ben Simmons recovery project.
Previously handled by Brett Brown, the mission is to spread conviction and belief that the Sixers’ flawed point guard is just a professional tweak, a few hours of practice, some foul-shooting instruction and a new voice away from becoming an NBA superstar.
The only surprise Monday was that Rivers was so quick to run it back considering that a night earlier Simmons refused to take a fourth-quarter shot for a fourth consecutive game as the Sixers were dumped from the playoffs with a 103-96 loss at home to the Atlanta Hawks.
Though a capacity crowd booed every Simmons missed free throw, and despite a growing impatience with the Sixers’ inability to win more than one playoff round, Rivers was not willing to join the chorus of the discontent.
Rather, he furthered the organizational narrative that Simmons some day, some way will emerge from an early-career struggle as a franchise savior.
“Yeah,” Rivers said from Camden on the first day of the Sixers’ offseason. “I know exactly what we want to do. I’m positive on Ben. I’m very bullish on Ben still. But there’s work. There is. And Ben is willing to do it. That’s the key.”
Rivers met with most of his players Monday, including Simmons, with whom he will have another sit-down in about a week.
Since Simmons still has four years remaining on a $177,000,000 contract, the head coach does have that obligation to make it work. But Simmons just averaged a career-low 14.3 points in the regular season, consenting to attempt 10 total three-point shots, including a few of the beat-the-buzzer desperation variety. But in the just-completed Atlanta series, he averaged only 8.6 points, did not attempt a three-pointer, missed 30 of his 45 free throws and was acceptable, but not dominating, at the defensive end.
So unreliable was the
24-year-old that Rivers began sitting him, situationally, late in close games. Still, the coach stressed that he is committed to developing Simmons for the 76ers, not packaging him for a potential trade.
“Sometimes, you have to go through stuff to see it and be honest with it,” Rivers said. “Obviously, what Ben just went through, I can’t imagine that. Because he has so much greatness around him in all of the things that he does, there are things he can fix quickly, in my opinion, or to get better in that will take him to another level.”
Since the Sixers already have committed to paying Simmons at the highest level, they are determined to try to work with him to reach that point. At least that’s one option. The other is to move on from the stagnant experiment and trade Simmons. Technically, that decision will be up to team president Daryl Morey, who will field press questions Tuesday morning. But it is widely known that Rivers did not agree to coach the Sixers without assurances that he would have a major voice in personnel decisions.
By publicly committing
to improving Simmons rather than simply apologizing for him, Rivers kept all options open. If the Sixers are looking for a way to move Simmons, they can sell the fact that he has been willing to work to improve. If they can’t, then at the close of the offseason they can declare the project a success, promising the fans they will see improvement.
Simmons, who previously had used his status as an All-Star to justify his unusual approach to majorleague point-guard play, at least sounds amenable to some offseason tutoring.
“I am going to do what I have to do, and work on my game to get better,” he said Sunday night. “You never want to let the highs get too high and the lows get too low. For me, it’s about more work.
“I’m going to work on my game. Right now, I just have to get my mind right and my body right.”
Without elaborating, Rivers did not dismiss a question about a very public story in April involving the Simmons family. While the allegations in the story were denied and not proven, Rivers implied that it may have impacted Simmons professionally.
“I can’t answer that, because I don’t know,” Rivers said. “But it is another example, and I am trying to say this right, that players are real people and they have real lives and they have real stuff going on. With my family, I have never had to deal with the public stuff that Ben had to deal with. But if I did, it would have affected me on the floor in some way or another. I can’t tell you if it affected him on the floor or not. I do not know that.”
Also, Simmons missed four late-season games with what was described as a flu-like illness. That did not appear to affect him in the first-round series against Washington, when he had two double-doubles and a triple-double.
Simmons, though, tended to vanish late in the Atlanta games. Rivers does not want that to happen again.
“We want him to get to the line 10 times a night,” Rivers said. “And so, we’ve got to put in the work. We can get there. And if we can get him there, man, his game goes to a different level.”