If you pay attention to basketball, you know what happened. Game Seven, Eastern Conference Semifinals the 76ers are down by two, with three minutes to go. Ben Simmons fakes Danilo Gallinari out of his shoes and finds himself all alone at the rim, with nothing standing between him and a game-tying dunk.
Except he doesn’t dunk. He hesitates a split second, then dishes to Matisse Thybulle. The delay gives the Hawks time to recover and foul Thybulle, who makes one of two free throws. The Sixers, the top seeds in the East, never lead again in the game and are eliminated from the playoffs.
Looking back, it’s hard to overstate how much that non-dunk changed things. If Philadelphia wins that game, they advance to the Eastern Conference Finals—a spot, by the way, that they still haven’t reached since the whole Process started. In the Finals, they would have met Milwaukee, which had just barely squeaked by a Nets team with Kyrie Irving injured and James Harden hobbling.
With home court in the Conference Finals and, hypothetically, the NBA Finals against Phoenix, who knows where that season goes? As for Simmons, he has played in a total of six games since that day.
Brooklyn Nets: One play changed Ben Simmons’career.
Simmons missed last season entirely, due in part to mental health issues brought on by being unwilling to play before Philadelphia fans after his non-dunk. He was traded to the Nets as part of the James Harden trade, a deal that has seemingly made both teams worse.
It’s easy to forget what a transcendent talent Simmons was before this. In 2021, he was the runner-up for Defensive Player of the Year and finished third on the All-NBA team. He finished in the top 30 in assists, rebounds, and steals. Most importantly, he was an effective offensive player, with a shooting percentage of 55.6% for his career. His shooting range was limited, but he was nearly unstoppable driving to the hoop and a good distributor.
So far this season, Simmons seems like a shell of that guy. He is averaging six points per game in 31 minutes, hardly shooting at all and making just 44 percent of his shots when he does, despite almost never shooting from more than a few feet away. The Nets are 29th in the league in defensive efficiency because opponents are shredding them when Simmons plays center.
They are 17th in offensive efficiency, despite having two Hall of Famers in the lineup because when Simmons plays with another big, the spacing is a mess. Now Simmons is out with a knee injury.
How has that one play affected Ben Simmons’ play this season for the Brooklyn Nets?
In retrospect, it’s hard to recall a sports career that turned so dramatically on one play. You can think of placekickers that shanked a winning field goal or relief pitchers that gave up a big home run, but kickers and relievers are seldom thought of as elite stars in their league.
The most famous reliever who ever gave up a series-changing home run was Dennis Eckersley, who gave up the famous Kirk Gibson homer in the 1988 World Series. Eckersley finished in the top five in Cy Young voting in three of the next four seasons, so it’s tough to make a case that the home run affected him.
There’s a reason for that. You don’t get to the level of an Eckersley if failure bothers you. Generally, you don’t even get to the level of what Ben Simmons was before the non-dunk if failure bothers you or if it even scares you. That’s what’s so odd about Simmons. He had his limitations, but he had carved out a career that was on track for the Hall of Fame by accepting those limitations and playing at an elite level anyway.
Now, it’s tough to imagine that ever happening again. Even if Simmons recovers fully from the knee and back issues that have almost been a sideshow to his other dramas, his best role is probably as a small-ball center surrounded by four shooters, similar to Draymond Green.
The Nets certainly have the shooters to make that work. But Simmons hasn’t shown the ability to play interior defense well enough to make that feasible so far. Maybe things will be different when he gets healthy and comfortable in a different environment. He is still just 26 years old, after all.
In the meantime, the Nets are on the hook for about $114 million for Simmons over the next three years. That likely makes him untradeable, and Kyrie Irving gets more untradeable every time he tweets, which means the Nets are left to hope that the old Ben Simmons is still somewhere, waiting to appear.