It's Scary That Ben Simmons Can Still Get Better

During the 2017-18 regular season, Ben Simmons, a 19 year-old omni-positional marvel, flirted with a triple-double almost every night—and, more importantly, played a key role in landing the Sixers a three-seed in the playoffs. Simmons was poised and inventive in ways that first-year teens just aren’t supposed be. The birther-esque campaign against his Rookie of the Year eligibility—started by Donovan Mitchell’s fans, then taken up by Mitchell himself, and finally by the apparel company he endorses—hinged as much on this implausibility as it did a non-existent technicality.

The postseason was a different story. Simmons’ utter lack of a jumper was no secret; it was a glaring hole in his otherwise freakishly well-rounded game. But somehow, over the course of 82 games, no opponent found a way to effectively exploit this weakness. Simmons never took jumpers because he didn’t have to. As with fellow unicorn Giannis Antetokounmpo, defenders knew his options were limited and yet had no answer for him going to the basket. Instead of being Simmons’s Achilles heel, his lack of a jumper became a badge of honor, a flagrant dare. It was sitting right there for the taking. Instead of making Simmons vulnerable, it made him more indomitable. The very constitution of his game was an affront to others.

Confidence in athletes is a funny thing. We find it endearing, even colorful, until we don’t; swagger is all in good fun and, in the case of lesser players, a welcome irony. Most importantly, it’s essential to high-level performance. No one ever made it to the pros without believing earnestly, on a semi-regular basis, they they are the most talented, more capable person on the court—and that, with great specificity, they’re better than those around them. The more capable the player, the more we expect them to exert this gravity on others. Star power, that quality that compels us, stems from a player’s ability to overshadow others, to make them look small when they could, under other circumstances, be running neck-in-neck. It’s as much about knocking them down a peg as rising above them.

Confidence can also, as was the case with Simmons for most of last season, be pronounced without having to be loud. His bearing was a mix of ferocity and detachment; that he carried himself like a professional despite his age was almost a flex, as was the tension between his freewheeling style of play and his blank expression when the action stopped. Simmons was speciously cast as a non-rookie because, in an extreme way, he heeded the proverbial advice to “act like you’ve been here before.” Comporting himself like a veteran wasn’t a matter of ego. It gave him a psychological edge. And why would he ever attempt to shot away from the paint when acknowledging his most glaring flaw when not doing so had become a source of power? Why would he admit he had work to do when that would chip away at the impression others had of him?

Simmons fed off of what we made of him, which served him well through the regular season and against the Heat in the first round of the playoffs. His game became a metaphor for a possible Sixers run. If Simmons could rule the world without a jumper, why couldn’t this young, sometimes misguided team make the Finals on the strength of Simmons, Joel Embiid, and a highly-motivated supporting cast? It didn’t seem like enough—it certainly wasn’t ideal—but there was something admirable and exciting about the Sixers’ refusal to go all in and refuse to be limited by their limitations. They put a stake in the ground and, if only provisionally, refused to be anything other than themselves. It gave them confidence, it gave us confidence in them, and it put them over the top against a gritty Miami team that could’ve dragged them down had the Sixers not been so high on their own supply. Underdogs are always punching up. Upstarts punch down whether or not they have any right to, which was what the Sixers did, and what defined Ben Simmons until he ran into the Celtics in the conference semis.

In retrospect, it all seems so obvious. Yes, the scouting report on Simmons had been a no-brainer for months and this hadn’t seemed to make a lick of difference. But the Celtics were too staunch and smart, and Brad Stevens too much of a demonic egghead, for them to not at least partly crack the code. They would come at Simmons, hard, and dare him to shoot. The assumption wasn’t that Simmons would respond to the challenge by adapting, but that he would pull off some version of what had worked just fine for him up to that point.

Maybe we were blinded by it, or having too much fun, but what no one grasped was that Simmons’s game was an all or nothing proposition. As Simmons struggled mightily against Boston, it felt suddenly like we’d been had. And suddenly, his confidence didn’t just ring hollow. It came off as hubris, or disdain for the basic demands of the sport. By the time the Celtics wrapped up the series, the air around Simmons seem to changed. He had looked very much like a player still coming into his own, a work in progress rather than a finished product. It didn’t help that, over in the West, Donovan Mitchell was putting the Jazz on his back and coming up big over and over again (although, as absolutely no one noted, this actually weakened the case for Mitchell as the real rookie).

Simmons was exposed in the Boston series and the process made us feel exposed—like we had been short-sighted and easily duped. When it comes to consuming sports, these are not necessarily bad things. It’s hard to have any fun if they’re completely absent from the equation. But when everyone’s supposed to be an expert, there’s increasingly little room for these elements. Simmons made us feel like we had behaved like credulous fans, not the astute observers of the sport we fancy ourselves to be, and we didn’t like that one bit. All the hyperbole and breathless praise, all the feelings of exaltation and “I can’t believe what I just saw” giddiness seemed to evaporate overnight.

Now heading into 2018-19, “will Ben Simmons ever start shooting?” is one of the most salient questions in the league. Based on last year, this needs to happen for the Sixers to have any chance of getting past Boston, who are the putative favorites to come of the East. Simmons has to expand his game to get better. It’s scary that he can get better still but it’s also time for him to cut his losses, lose the shtick, and develop further. If he doesn’t, the Sixers have a major problem on their hands that goes beyond the match-up with the Celtics. But what also remains to be seen is how we watch Ben Simmons going forward. Will we now look at him and only see his flaws, how far he still has to go? Or will we once against be lulled into a state of awe that leaves minimal room for critique? Hopefully, it will be some combination of the two. We had a good, idiotic run with Ben Simmons last year. If we lose all memory of that, we’re also losing an important part of ourselves.