Set aside whatever you think about Ben Simmons. Remove expectations, resist the urge to worry about box score stats, and politely disregard his occasional drip of wishful thinking.
Instead, there are more useful questions that frame Simmons’s current status: Does he make his teammates better? Will he stay on the floor in crunch time? How’s he moving? What’s his role and position? Is he able to function in any lineup, regardless of who else is in it? Fundamentally, how does he impact winning?
Given who he was from 2018 to 2021—a form-breaking, futuristic building block—whatever answers emerge over the next few months are a big deal for Simmons, the rest of the NBA, and the competitive, albeit flawed, Brooklyn Nets roster, which could really use grade A playmaking. Through the season’s first couple of weeks, there have been blips of the singular two-way force he once was, but they’re offset by head-scratching hesitation. He’s taking only six shots per game and has the worst turnover percentage and eighth-lowest usage rate in the entire league.
Right now, nobody can say what’s real, whether he’s plateaued or ascending. But so long as Simmons is healthy—a sore hip and some load management for the back injury that plagued him last season have sidelined him for two games—and playing point guard on a team with plenty of outside shooting and no low-post presence, he’s operating in an ideal situation without any excuses. However this ultimately unfolds, it’s already a fascinating subplot.
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The season opener, though, was rough sledding. In only 23 minutes against Cleveland—including just eight in the second half, when he was benched during crunch time—Simmons finished with four points on six shots. “It’s the first game of the year, but it didn’t look like he was as aggressive as I’ve seen before,” Cavs forward Georges Niang, who played for the Sixers during Simmons’s holdout 2021-22 season, told me. “I’ve seen him score 40 on us in Utah when I was there.”
Simmons’s nine assists and 10 rebounds were a nice sign, as were a few subtle plays that won’t show up in a box score, like this race into a dribble handoff that gave Cam Johnson an open 3.
But unless and until Simmons shakes off his timidity, these are the types of plays he’ll need to sneak into the action if he wants to even begin to make up for his negative gravity. “I think that’s kind of the role that he’s gonna have to transition to, probably,” Niang said about that clip after the game. “He sets really elite screens. Elite screener, elite passer. I think the element of his game that they saw in Philadelphia was his ability to score. So I don’t know if that’s still a part of it. But you know, what I saw today, it was more him facilitating and being a really good screener.”
Being a really good screener is not nothing—especially on a team that has so many ball handlers who can pull up from anywhere. Simmons has more screen assists than Bam Adebayo, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Joel Embiid.
But it’s almost impossible to steer a consistent NBA offense if you can’t or won’t score. Stars make defenses compromise. Too often, Simmons settles before the defense even considers doing so. There’s a troubling skittishness that extends beyond his aversion to attacking downhill with a live dribble. Plays like these aren’t just catnip for Simmons skeptics; they unnecessarily stifle the natural flow of an NBA offense:
In another case, after he cuts into the paint and gets behind Brook Lopez, Simmons acts like there’s some objective worth striving for other than putting the ball through the hoop:
Simmons has never been a great free throw shooter, but during his three All-Star seasons, that didn’t stop him from getting there. From 2019 to 2021, he averaged 5.2 free throw attempts per game. Contrast that with this season, when he went 1-for-4 in his first six games! Despite being explosive enough to sky above the rim for a chase-down block or putback dunk, he’s driving about half as often as he did a few years ago—at 5.1 per game, he ranks in the 15th percentile among all players who’ve driven the ball at least 30 times this season—and then shying away from contact on the rare instances when he does look to score, be it with an awkward runner or right-handed hook shot. (Related: Simmons has logged only three post-ups so far, with one coming on the very first play of the season.)
When the ball is in his hands, pick-and-rolls are still a nonstarter. The few Simmons has run this season are immediately neutralized by defenders who duck under the screen, or by a simple switch that stalls all of his momentum. He’s spent far more possessions—53 to be exact, according to Second Spectrum—clogging the lane in the dunker spot, and Brooklyn has generated a sorry 0.82 points per direct play on these chances.
Simmons clearly isn’t the scoring threat he once was—this clip is from 2020 and feels like it happened 25 years ago—but there are positive, hopeful takeaways from these first couple of weeks. He’s nearly back to his old self as a shot creator, and watching Simmons now, you’re reminded why his downfall actually matters. Fatal flaws and all, there’s still no one like him: Radar vision and unteachable instincts meld into a powerful 6-foot-10 body that he can use to explode into the paint whenever he wants. There might not be a faster human being in the NBA.
So far this season, he’s attacked coast-to-coast, ducked into the paint against smaller defenders, and leveraged his speed on fake dribble handoffs. With center Nic Claxton out with an ankle injury since opening night, Simmons has been able to function with more space than he otherwise would have. His footwork, physicality, and uncanny speed are all there; he can still zip-line through the lane with a tight in-and-out dribble:
When Simmons is on the floor, the Nets also don’t spend as much time in the half court, which is a perk. He increases his team’s transition frequency more than all but a handful of players and single-handedly manufactures corner 3s (Simmons currently ranks second in assist ratio, a.k.a. the number of assists a player averages per 100 possessions used).
Simmons’s skill set may not be couture, but there’s upside here since we know he’ll spend a ton of minutes in mutually beneficial lineups, surrounded by 3-point shooters who aren’t comfortable consistently creating their own looks. Put a bunch of them around an aggressive Simmons, and there will be a decent number of possessions that turn into a pick-your-poison conundrum for opposing defenses.
“He makes passes that 95 percent of the league can’t even see,” Cavaliers head coach J.B. Bickerstaff recently said. Simmons whips darts that catch defenders flat-footed and afford shooters a split second of extra time to get their jumper off. Pinpoint, court-length kick-aheads do not hurt, either.
“I think Ben is really a pass-first guy, and he is big and strong and has a quick first step, etc., to get into the paint,” said Sixers head coach Nick Nurse. “And sometimes you gotta decide how much help you’re gonna use on him. It just kind of depends because he will beat you up a little bit at the rim with his physicality if you don’t send some help, and if you send help, he’s pretty good about firing it out.”
As the season wears on, it’ll be interesting to see other teams adjust their coverages and make Simmons score. Coaches won’t want to help off the strongside corner as in the clip above, but they also won’t be willing to let Simmons go one-on-one for an entire game. Time will tell whether he’s even willing to force their hand.
So far, he’s averaging 6.5 points, and only a handful of players have a higher at-rim shot frequency—all centers, per Cleaning the Glass. Brooklyn’s half-court offense has been a whopping 14.1 points per 100 plays better when Simmons is not on the floor (and below league average when he’s in the game).
Some of this is small-sample-size theater, some of it’s due to predictable issues that can’t be circumvented when Simmons is off the ball and five defenders are guarding four Nets, and some of it can be explained by the growing pains that come for any team that’s incorporating a unique player. Brooklyn isn’t always on the same page. Watch this possession, which begins with Simmons driving right at a Mikal Bridges duck-in before it dies on the vine.
These issues complicate the part of Simmons’s game that has no capitulation: defense. He can guard just about anyone, from Luka Doncic to Bam Adebayo. But if Nets coach Jacque Vaughn believes Simmons is more of a liability on offense than a plus when Brooklyn doesn’t have the ball, his impact is moot when games are on the line. Consider Brooklyn’s aforementioned one-point loss on opening night, when Mitchell hit an open pull-up 3 with 13 seconds to go. Coming out of a timeout, the Nets had five good defenders on the floor, but Simmons—who might be the best of the bunch—was not one of them.
“You’ll see our minutes kind of range across the board because we do have depth and versatility,” Vaughn said after the game, when asked about Simmons’s playing time. “So this won’t be the last time that happens.”
Two nights later, Simmons was subbed out with a minute to go after Doncic took advantage of Brooklyn’s switch-everything scheme and hit a few ridiculous 3s over Spencer Dinwiddie and Mikal Bridges.
It’s a strategy Vaughn might want to tweak, given Simmons’s value on the ball versus away from it. Right now he’s switching 10.3 screens per 100 possessions as the ball handler’s man. Last season that number was 8.2, and his previous career high (in 2018) was 4.3.
Which brings us back to how critical circumstance is for Simmons to make good on his claim of someday being better than he used to be. The dramatic tension is inescapable: Can someone who was once on a Hall of Fame trajectory stop being his own worst enemy? The time for Simmons to course correct is not unlimited.
The process of embracing, enduring, and experimenting with Simmons may last weeks, months, or the rest of his career. It’s too soon to know whether or when his strengths will outshine his weaknesses, or whether it’s even possible for a team to succeed while he holds the keys. There’s a valuable player here, for sure. But at what cost? And in what context does it even make sense to accept the good with the bad, and be patient enough to see how far he can go?
Stats through Wednesday’s games.
