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?
