Jacque Vaughn, coach of the Nets, has announced that Ben Simmons has a good chance of not playing again this season. He served as a reminder that the Australian point guard is still active and plays for the Brooklyn franchise. This is how inconsequential the person who pointed to a generational player has become and was selected for the All Star three times (2019, 2020 and 2021). Physical and psychological problems once again jeopardize a career that pointed to the top of the NBA.
Simmons hasn’t played a game since February 15. He suffered a right knee injury. He recently he was re-evaluated and he was diagnosed with a nerve impingement in his back. With eight games to go in the regular season, Vaughn said, “The reality is he probably won’t be joining us for the rest of the year.” In the 42 games he has played with the Nets, he has averaged 6.9 points, 6.3 rebounds and 6.1 assists in 26.3 minutes. All of them are by far the worst records of his career..
There is nothing or very little left of that boy called to be one of the icons of the NBA, a 2.08-meter point guard with great vision of the game and a sensational passing ability, almost unstoppable in the open field, with great ease to create triple-doubles and capable of defending any of the five rivals, virtue highly valued in current basketball. Of course, nobody asked him for an outside shot, his main ballast: 5/36 in their 317 League games. A lousy 13.9% that ended up conditioning the defenses, because the fear of failure settled in the depths of his brain and he no longer even dared to throw.
First year blank after being number 1 in the draft
When the Sixers selected him first in the 2016 draft They already knew all that, but Simmons was part of the process that should make them fight for the ring, also led by Joel Embiid. But he missed the entire first season with a foot injury. In the following four, the team never came to confirm expectations despite the point guard’s good performance: 15.9 points, 8.1 rebounds, 7.7 assists and 1.7 recoveries per game during his time in Philadelphia. In fact, the relationship ended traumatically.
A play dynamited the trajectory of the Australian player. The Sixers had been the best team in the East in the 2020-21 season. After eliminating the Wizards in the first round (4-1), they met the Hawks, fifth, in the conference semifinal. They reached the seventh game. With three and a half minutes remaining, with Atlanta winning by two points (86-88), Simmons dumped Danilo Gallinari and, with timid opposition from Trae Young, gave up what looked like an easy dunk. to assist Matisse Thybulle, who ended up being fouled. That action marked the game, the series, lost by the Sixers, and the point guard’s career, criticized by his coach Doc Rivers and by Embiid, his teammate and franchise player..
Shaky departure from the Sixers
The following season was spent in white. After that convulsive end of the course, refused to play with the Philadelphians. The team said they were looking for a transfer, but nobody offered what they were asking for a player who had been a three-time All Star. For each game he missed, he was fined $360,000. The total reached 19 million. Simmons alleged psychological problems. Then a back injury that prevented him from playing even after being traded to the Nets in February 2022 in the trade that removed James Harden from Brooklyn.
On October 19 of last year, finally, he debuted with the Nets. Until the tenth game he did not score 10 points. Few launches and with little confidence. Of course, hardly any triples. Thus, leaving only glimpses of the player he was and with minimal statistics from his career, he spent his season until on February 15, the last time he was seen on the track. It happened a few days after Kevin Durant left for the Suns and Kyrie Irving was traded to the Mavericks. He was left as the only representative of a trident that should have been glorious in Brooklyn, but ended in fiasco.
Now everything indicates that Simmons will not return until the next exercise. He is in his third year of a five-year contract in exchange for $177 million. To his recurring physical problems is added the psychological, a kind of terror, stage fright that has long prevented him from showing his best versionvery good even with the handicap of the outside shot. He is an inconsequential star surrounded by doubts about whether he will come close again at some point and in a team to the player he was.
