PHILADELPHIA — It is finished now, officially. The confidential settlement that the 76ers and Ben Simmons reached Monday, over the grievance Simmons filed to regain some of the $20 million the Sixers withheld from him last season because he refused to play for them, closed an ugly if interesting era here.
This was a standoff that no one won. Simmons arrived with the hope that he might be the next LeBron James and left as a punch line turned cautionary tale. But he also left with money in his pocket; whatever Simmons’ personal and professional defects, he and his agents understood the NBA’s power dynamic and used it to their advantage. Simmons got exactly what he wanted. He got out of Philadelphia, and he got paid for departing, and he damaged the Sixers in the process. They stagnated for three-quarters of a season while Daryl Morey waited for his vision of an ideal trade — one that included James Harden — to materialize, then bowed out in the playoffs’ second round for the fourth time in five years.
We may never know the dollar figure the Sixers had to pay to make Simmons, fully and finally, a problem for the Brooklyn Nets alone to solve. But there’s a more consequential mystery that remains: Why did the Sixers make him the No. 1 pick in the 2016 draft in the first place? Should they — and, really, the rest of the NBA — have seen his self-destructive petulance coming? And if they didn’t, why didn’t they?
This thought experiment isn’t just simple second-guessing. There were red flags about Simmons throughout his only year of college basketball, his 2015-16 season at LSU. The question that every talent evaluator and decision-maker had to answer was, how big and bright are each of those flags? They were discussion topics at the time, sure, but only so many people took them seriously.
A consensus emerged that Simmons was and would be the best player in that draft, that it would be shocking if the Sixers picked Brandon Ingram from Duke or Jaylen Brown from Cal or anyone else, and that his reluctance to shoot jump shots or compete in the postseason NIT was merely a function of a kid who had grown up in a different cultural milieu from most prospective draftees. He grew up in Australia. College basketball didn’t matter much there. So who cares that he went through the motions at LSU and agreed to be the subject of an anti-NCAA documentary? Did you see his speed and vision and passing?
The trouble with consensus, though, is that it can blind even those who are regarded as experts in their fields to the reality that is right in front of their noses. This truth can be applied to any number of areas — politics, science, sociology, business — but let’s consider a couple of sports-related examples.
Go back and peruse the coverage of Super Bowl LII, of how many NFL observers were surprised by the Eagles’ decision not just to go for it on fourth-and-goal against the Patriots, but that they would call a trick play. The obvious reality, if you had paid any attention, that the Eagles had been an aggressive team in such situations all season. The consensus was, You can’t do that against Bill Belichick and Tom Brady. Go back and rewatch — as the writer Michael Brendan Dougherty recently did — the 1990 heavyweight championship bout between Mike Tyson and Buster Douglas. The obvious reality was that Douglas dominated the fight from the opening bell. The consensus, as expressed throughout the fight by commentators Jim Lampley and Larry Merchant, was that Tyson was the baddest dude on the planet and was unbeatable and was winning, even though Douglas was pounding him to a pulp.
The same sort of unintentional blindness has applied to Simmons throughout his career. Once people started operating from certain presumptions about him, his flaws became easier to overlook or dismiss. He was supposed to be the No. 1 pick in the draft and an NBA superstar, so his hesitancy and inability to shoot would surely correct themselves over time. He was supposed to be the No. 1 pick in the draft and an NBA superstar, so LSU’s collective regression with him had to be a function of the program and his coaches and his teammates and had nothing to do with him. He was supposed to be the No. 1 pick in the draft and an NBA superstar, so the points and rebounds he averaged, his raw statistics, mattered more than his tangible and intangible effect on each game’s outcome.
One example: A college coach once described to me a scene that took place after his team had beaten LSU. “We walked back in the tunnel,” he said. “Our staff looked at each other, and someone said we did a great job on Simmons. Then we looked at the box score.”
Simmons had scored more than 25 points and grabbed more than 15 rebounds.
“That should tell you the kind of respect we had for Simmons,” the coach said, “to get the line he did when we felt like we did a phenomenal job on him.”
Or it should tell you something else: that those numbers were relatively hollow. That perhaps Simmons’ impact on the game wasn’t as profound as the box score would suggest. That when you start to see what you want to see or think you’re supposed to see, instead of what’s actually happening, you set yourself up for failure. That’s the lasting lesson of Ben Simmons’ tenure with the Sixers. That’s the small benefit to six otherwise wasted years.
