A lack of Benthusiasm
I’ve had my fill of Ben Simmons.
I know, right? Who hasn’t?
It isn’t that he wants to leave town. There have been plenty of those before. And hey, we’ve done our fair share of running people out of town.
It’d be so much easier if it were about money. That’d be easy to understand.
But instead, this is about Ben Simmons. And we have to tread softly here, because it seems mental and he has had a lot going on in his personal life. But Simmons wants out because he feels too much pressure to succeed and the organization doesn’t have his back.
The shortcomings of Ben Simmons are not new. They were just easier to tolerate when expectations were lower.
When the Sixers were tanking, everyone could grit their teeth and put up with it. The club, the coaches, the organization worked with him. Hired people to build him up mentally and work on his game. Fans cut him some slack. But when you are expected to make the finals, it’s a different ballgame.
Simmons made a wrong decision when he passed on taking a shot with the season on the line. He took a lot of heat for it, and rightly so. It happens to the best athletes, but with Simmons, it was just par for the course, the same issues everyone had seen since his first year on the floor. And those same coaches, teammates and fans who backed him up for so long finally reached a point of exasperation.
It was a bad situation, but, ironically, still fixable. Jason Kelce summed it up quite well:
At every step, instead of owning his situation, he has blamed his teammates, the fans, the organization. Those same people who cut him so much slack his entire professional career. Who gave him a contract that should earn him in excess of $30 million this season, and more than $40 million in just a few short years — talk about an albatross around the club’s neck.
When Simmons finally showed up to camp, some even thought everyone could resolve their differences and move on to a better place. Instead, he just became more of a distraction. Obviously, the goal is to destabilize the team and become so much of a nuisance they’ll trade him for a bunch of old basketballs.
If he doesn’t want to play in Philadelphia, fine. But why, then, continually torpedo your over-inflated trade value every time you have your mouthpiece speak or you “don’t show up” for camp or practice?
Joel Embiid said the other day he has stopped thinking about “that man.” That was generous. These are the actions of a child.
The Sixers may be overestimating his trade value based on the ludicrous amount of money they have committed to him, but Simmons is acting like he is one of the top three players in the league.
Certainly, he’s been an all star and possesses great defensive skills (which this team will sorely miss), but come on!
This is the guy who has consistently disappeared in big games. T.J. McConnell is a postseason legend because Simmons couldn’t cut it. He’s got serious deficiencies in his game and doesn’t seem to want to improve on them. He’s a suspect teammate. It increasingly appears he helped get rid of Jimmy Butler. And he won’t shoot.
What big team is going to give him the opportunity now at the price he wants? The Bucks? The Lakers? You can’t build around him, and he seems allergic to pressure. At best he’s looking like an expensive defensive specialist, sixth man or a big fish in a small pond with a fan base that couldn’t give a rip.
And, lest we forget, he also opted out of playing for his country in the olympics to “work on his game.” Evidence of which we have yet to see.
Which brings us back to the mental side of it. I really don’t think he wants to play NBA basketball. Oh, I’m sure he likes the money, the lifestyle, the Kardashians, but he genuinely seems to lack the desire successful athletes have to win. I think he’s got stage fright. He can’t handle the pressure of expectations.
That could go a long way to explaining some of his antics, and his tendency to blame everyone but not take a good, hard look at himself. And, if so, I sympathize. As Lane Johnson has recently reminded us, we are all human. I’d rather he be happy, and maybe playing NBA basketball is not going to make him happy.
You’d hope that some of the people around him might help him figure that out.