Ben Simmons Is Fooling The NBA Again, im sorry

Ben Simmons is fooling the NBA again. #NBA

In 2016, Ben Simmons was the first pick in the NBA draft. In 2018, he won Rookie of the Year and was electric in the playoffs. In 2019, he became an All-Star but choked in the playoffs. In 2020, he was selected to his first All-NBA Team but got worse and still wouldn’t shoot jump shots, but it’s ok right because In 2021, he still wouldn’t shoot, passing up open dunks. And in 2022, he chose to sit courtside instead of playing on the court and in the games he played, he averaged 7 points a game, and wasn’t even a starter.

It’s 2023 and we’re still talking about Ben Simmons. Apparently he’s back and well everyone wants to talk about it

Ben Simmons is fooling the NBA again, I’m going to prove the 3 reasons how** and why we need to stop talking about Ben Simmons starting with the endless hype and cycle.

Media has propped up Ben to new heights even when his play wasn’t. Looking at Google trends, Ben has remained extremely relevant even when he doesn’t play.

The same as 2018, Ben Simmons was coming off winning ROTY the season before, so seeing his workout video had us hyped… until he was exposed during the playoffs by Jared Dudley and the Brooklyn Nets with missing posters outside the arena.

In 2019, there was another video of Ben going off in a pickup game, even hitting long step back three-pointers … but his play during the season showed us the same player again unwilling to shoot, even against the worst teams in the NBA like the Suns. Low stakes, no pressure… but he still had a six-point game… and then two more single-digit games, all in the first month of the season. These were just the first signs of Ben Simmons having extreme doubts about himself now that more people were starting to tune in and watch him play.

In 2020… we watched more Ben Simmons offseason highlights… but then he was afraid to shoot a layup over six-foot Trae Young during the playoffs

In 2021, Ben knew we get fooled by these videos… so was at it again fresh off the worst series of his career, looking like he was determined for the best season of his life… then he decided to sit out, quit on the team, and injured his back out of nowhere when Philly sent him to Brooklyn…

In 2022, Ben wanted to show us that he was now fully healthy now in his yearly offseason shooting video… but proceeded to average seven points, not willing to shoot wideopen layups and got shut down during the season with another strange injury…

The Nets fell for nostalgia and other teams are too. Ben Simmons was once a nightly triple-double threat who averaged 16, 8, and 8 but his scoring has steadily went down every year after his second season. But it’s not just scoring. He became a liability on the court. He was part of one of the worst lineups in the NBA last season, we weren’t even out of the month of OCTOBER yet and Simmons already had the sixth WORST plus-minus in all of the NBA, his defensive rating was the 18th worst… and was so zoned out mentally that he fouled out TWO times in Brooklyn’s first three games of the season.

In fact, if we just take a look at all players in the NBA, Ben Simmons is a below average player.

And this might have been ok if Ben was at the end of the bench making 5 mil a year but no the man makes 35 million for crying out loud, a max contract. I mean man hit the MJ shrug to the Philly crowd after hitting 2 free throws in 1st quarter. That might tell you where we at.

Simmons began dealing with a knee injury and was hit with consecutive DNPs... amid chaos already happening in Brooklyn with the team already souring on Ben Simmons’ horrible play to start the season.

Because after Ben signed a max contract and had an entire playoff series where he wouldn’t shoot in the 4th quarter, he stopped reporting to the 76ers and after a whole bunch of fines, pissing off Embiid and his teammates, got traded.

And so after 16 months of not playing and eventually succeeding in forcing a trade, Simmons would now be somewhere in Brooklyn where he would now supposedly be happy… it was something both he and the Nets were looking forward to.

Remember… Ben Simmons strongly believed that it was the way his teammates and coaches treated him and handled the situation after the Hawks series that made him want out…

So, there was no excuse for Simmons to shy away in Brooklyn… he had everything set up perfectly for him.

Ben’s trade value is now zero, but that should have happened a while back. The 76ers and even the Nets sacrificed a lot for Ben, took their entire franchises off track, but the solution is simple yet almost never done.

What the NBA needs to do is learn to separate hype with current play.

So let’s stop talking about Ben Simmons. ****It’s time to move on, I don’t want to make another video on him unless he’s playing out of his mind.