We Just Couldn't Make Ben Simmons Care Enough
The hardest thing to do in any important relationship -- romantic, platonic, familial, professional -- is to get someone to care more than they actually do.
Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and is now writing for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.
Andrew's writing is brought to you by Kinetic Skateboarding! Not only the Ricky's approved skate shop, but the best place to get Chucks, Vans, any apparel. Use code "DAVESILVER" for 9.1% off your order.
The hardest thing to do in any important relationship -- romantic, platonic, familial, professional -- is to get someone to care more than they actually do. You can cajole, you can incentivize, you can threaten or try to manipulate if you're that desperate, you can attempt to make up for it by caring more yourself. But ultimately, they either care enough or they don't. And if they don't, it can be a tough road ahead.
I never got a handle on what Ben Simmons really cared about. Did he want to win? Did he want to get paid? Did he want the fame, the celebrity? Did he just want to be left alone and let play? Did he want to be The Guy, or did he want to just be a guy? All of them seemed accurate at various points throughout his Sixers tenure, but never totally, and never for long. His actions betrayed no clear motivation, his words even less -- and if you could get a read off that permanently expressionless mug, you're basically Doyle Brunson. We never knew what he wanted. We were only ever really let in to what he didn't want.
The main thing he didn't want, at least for the first five years of his Sixers tenure, was to shoot -- and more than that, he didn't want to be told he had to shoot. Brett Brown tried just about every tactic at his disposal short of hostage-taking to get Ben to recognize the importance of his shooting more to the team, and Ben responded to all of them by shooting even less. Doc Rivers, perhaps sensing a pattern, made no such efforts to change Ben's game, which paid off -- first with the most successful drama-free regular season of the Process era, and then with one of the most catastrophic postseason collapses in postseason history. When Doc decided it was finally time for him to Say Something, Ben responded by shutting down altogether. We might've found a way to move forward with him if he had expressed frustration, regret, anger, accountability, anything to show that he cared as much about his own underwhelming performance and how to recover from it as we did. He was not interested in doing so.
This season, the main thing Ben didn't want was to play for the Sixers. You almost had to respect his conviction in the matter: He was willing to sacrifice many millions, further tank his already wildly unpoular star image, and wage a miserable and wholly unsuccessful six-month PR spin campaign just to have to not set foot on the Not-Wells Fargo Center's court ever again. Now, he's gotten his wish: Ben Simmons is a Brooklyn Net, and will only visit our floor again when he comes out of the other team's locker room. Chances seem pretty good he'll duck that for at least the remainder of this regular season too. If and when he does come back, I'll boo him as loudly as anyone, from my living room if not from the arena's upper level.
I am a firm believer in not letting bad endings totally ruin the memories of good relationships, so at this point I will mention -- if it makes past Spike's edits, anyway -- that Ben Simmons is still probably the second-best Sixer of the last 15 years, and one of the players I have most enjoyed watching. His ability to simplify the game when he was at his best was unnerving: He turned defense into offense. He got dunkers their dunks, three-point shooters their three-pointers. He saw open space and he moved into it. For all that he and Jimmy Butler ultimately failed to coexist, the two were breathtaking in the open floor together; for all that we missed out on by not being able to keep Jimmy and Joel together, losing a long run of Simmons with Butler throwing lobs to one another and tearing shit up in tandem on the perimeter hurts nearly as much.
The 16-game season-ending win streak and first-round immolation of Miami during Simmons' rookie year is probably the most uncomplicated happy memory he leaves us with. But for my money his greatest stretch as a Sixer was when Embiid's freaky hand injury against OKC kept him out for most of January 2020, and Simmons led the team on a 6-3 stretch in which he did absolutely everything: 22-9-8 on 65% shooting, capped by a jawdropping 34-12-12 MLK Day performance against his new team that featured him and Matisse absolutely sucking out the Nets' will to live in the second half. After that stretch, I went to the NBA store in Manhattan and bought a wildly overpriced Ben Simmons jersey. I'm wearing it right now as I write this.
Well, OK, I guess Simmons didn't do absolutely everything for the Sixers, even in that stretch: He still didn't shoot, and he still didn't score in the fourth quarter. Even over that stretch of blinding production, discussion of his performance was still subsumed by talk of the things he didn't do, and whether that would ever change while he was on the Sixers. A lot of us wanted to believe it didn't matter. He certainly wanted us to believe it didn't matter. Brett Brown prayed to God that it would ultimately not matter. Soon enough, it mattered.
That still photo of Ben Simmons at the Not-WFC net, in the waning minutes of Game 7 against the Atlanta Hawks -- with only a 4 foot 2 Trae Young (not really) standing in his way -- as he inexplicably prepares to whip a pass to a well-I-guess-I'm-cutting-now Matisse Thybulle rather than dunking it himself, will certainly be the indelible image that he leaves most fans with. It's not the only reason we lost that Game 7 (it may or may not be the biggest), but it's a fair visual stand-in for the problems that most plagued the Sixers over the previous four seasons. Joel Embiid wasn't ready to carry them over the goal-line on his own, and Ben Simmons was some combination of unable and unwilling to help -- by adjusting his game, by stepping out of his comfort zone, by caring enough to take accountability and do what was necessary to help his team get over a not-even-particularly-high hump.
I do believe it's as much "unable" as "unwilling." This is an uncomfortable discussion and one none of us including Ben Simmons are likely ready to have -- not that this is really the time for it anyway -- but I do suspect there may be legitimate mental issues with Ben that we (and perhaps he) do not yet understand the full scope of, and which may very well give this entire chapter of Sixers history a wildly different framing in retrospect. I still can relate on some level to his central plight of knowing there's something you can do that will change your entire career and/or life for the better and for whatever reason just not being able to do it; I imagine many others reading can too. It's a shame that he wasn't able to make it easier on either us or himself by being more open and honest about his struggles, but in most lines of work it wouldn't be incumbent on an ailing professional to detail the causes behind his most embarrassing struggles for the benefit of millions of increasingly impatient onlookers. It makes me queasy to think of him immediately succeeding with the Nets and starting this cycle all over again; it makes me even queasier to think of him having the same issues and just doubling down on his defensiveness while becoming an enemy within his own fanbase for a second time. It's a tough situation, and I do hope Ben manages to find his way through it.
All that said, I'm of course overjoyed to have him do it somewhere else. We probably passed the point of no return the second Ben passed to Matisse, and any attempt to pretend otherwise was wasteful. I'm grateful to Daryl Morey and the surprising patience of both Sixers ownership and Joel Embiid that we were able to wait long enough to get real value for Simmons, so that him returning only John Collins or Malcolm Brogdon in trade doesn't have to be just one more thing we hold against him. But it was inevitable his next game played would be for another team, and I'd made peace with that even before news circulated of him refusing to report to camp. We tried our best with him and Joel, and for a variety of reasons big and small, it didn't work. It was time for all sides to move on.
Does the way this saga dragged out for nine months, while Simmons seemingly did everything in his power to further alienate already virulent Sixers fans (on both sides of the Process aisle), mean that the bad stuff is all we'll remember for him? Probably. For a long time, certainly: Simmons had already proven charmless to so many that by the time he shruggingly went full heel, it was hardly much of an adjustment for most fans to turn on him completely. It's about as bad a breakup as we've ever seen in the NBA, and the highs with Ben -- three first-round playoff victories, the East's top seed in 2021, the aforementioned 16-game winning streak, two All-Star Game appearances, the famous Rookie? of the Year win in 2018 -- weren't quite so high that they'll invariably heal all wounds with the benefit of time. Still, never say never with this stuff: Toronto fans almost certainly would've predicted the same about Vince Carter upon his mid-'00s trade to New Jersey, and he’s gotten a couple very nice tributes and warm home greetings as a visiting player in recent years. Ben did help preside over the most consistently successful Sixers era in two decades, and that's not nothing. There might be a day where we're ready to forgive, if not necessarily to forget.
Of course, the question comes back to whether Ben Simmons would even give a shit if we did or not. Winning us back will certainly not be his top priority -- nor, in all likelihood, will be winning his new fans (lol) in Brooklyn over. Really I have no idea what Ben Simmons' top priority will be now that the top action item on his list has been satisfied. Does he want to rehabilitate his image, his brand? Does he want to do what he must to put the pieces together with KD and Kyrie and win a championship? Does he even really want to play basketball all that badly in the first place? We don't know, and luckily, we don't need to anymore. We could never make Ben Simmons care as much as we wanted him to, as much as we did -- at least not in the same way, at least not in the way where he could do anything to show it. It's Brooklyn's problem now. I hope Ben finds what he's looking for. I hope he knows what that even is. I hope he figures it out far away from us.