John Riordan: Missing in action - The rise and fall of Philadelphia star Ben Simmons

It was never meant to be like this when the NBA's Philadelphia 76ers drafted top prospect Ben Simmons whose mental fragility has begun to win the battle over his physical gifts

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY: A spectator wears a T-shirt with the image of Ben Simmons who told the Philadelphia 76ers that he wasn’t yet ‘prepared mentally’ to take the court. Picture: Tim Nwachukwu/Getty Images

The relatively lopsided nature of their early season victory wasn’t enough for the fans of the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night.

Nor did it matter so much that the home team was finally ending a long losing streak against their visiting rivals from Philadelphia.

As the fourth and final quarter ticked towards a win — their first in 16 clashes with the 76ers — the happy home crowd saw fit to twist the knife and goad their foe about an absent teammate.

The famous arena swelled with a simple chorus line highlighting a Philly drama with no easy ending in sight. “Where’s Ben Simmons?” they chanted over and over again to
devastating effect as they watched their team stroll to a double-digits winning margin.

As obnoxious as New York fans can be in times of success, they tend towards apathy during barren spells. Which is the dominant scenario around these parts over the past decade or so.

Meanwhile, although the City of Brotherly Love certainly likes its championships, they really thrive when times are tough, revelling in misery and specialising in a unique form of self-loathing whether it be the Phillies or the Eagles or the Sixers letting them down. It is a particularly hateful place when the losses pile up or when a well-paid star is underperforming or, in this case, not at all.

The last time they got to watch Ben Simmons play for their team, he was withering before summer even began on one of the NBA’s biggest stages.

The highly fancied 76ers had spent several seasons building a squad around him and several other talented recruits. They had earned the right to draft these high end prospects through a calculated method of ‘tanking’; purposefully losing in order to end the season with the worst record and therefore potentially earning them one of the more favourable draft positions.

The 2020-21 season looked set to be the one out of which would emerge the fruition of years of planning. They ended the regular season as the best seeded team in the East, a far cry from the bottom of the barrel days of the recent past.

It was shaping up perfectly for a real run at the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy but instead, the Sixers unravelled against the Atlanta Hawks in the Eastern Conference semi-final and Simmons ended up as the poster boy for their failure.

Which is not where anyone wants to be in Philadelphia. However, when you seem to be as mentally fragile as the young Australian, it is a suffocating fate. And when your basketball life is spotlit as far back as the most vulnerable years of your development, it can be especially precarious.

Basketball is the one sport in America where the best 16- or 17-year-old player in the nation can be earmarked and worshipped beyond recognition. Occasionally it pays off; LeBron James is the most recent archetype for a successful conversion from hype to the hall of fame (as soon as he’s eligible). He stepped off his high school basketball court to pose for the cover of Sports Illustrated and then he more than delivered.

The hopes were almost as high for Simmons as he began to blossom. His US-born father, a retired professional basketball player who settled in Australia after a hoops career there, was one of the reasons his son excelled at the game before moving to Florida to test himself against similarly talented ballers.

He climbed quickly to the top of the rankings and made his official mark as the top high school junior in the country — roughly equivalent to being the best among fifth year secondary school students. That late adolescent year is a significant one in the fate of the budding pro because that’s when the top colleges are locking in the best recruits on offer.

Simmons chose to do his requisite college stint at Louisiana State University and entered the draft as quickly as he could at the end of his Freshman season in 2016. The artificially lowly 76ers were there waiting to scoop him up as the first pick and the scheme was suddenly crystallising.

It should have been a sound gamble but there’s no counting for the humanity of stardom.

Fast forward to this year and the 6’10’’ point guard has just turned 25, earning almost €30m a year. So you could possibly forgive your average sports-loving Philadelphian for wondering why one of their best players has found a way to fall off the rails.

The Atlanta team that shockingly dumped them out of the play-offs in June was not the first team to get inside the head of the Aussie but they did it in the starkest way on the biggest stage, up until that point.

Before elaborating on the weakness exploited by the Hawks (and other opponents before them), it’s important to note that Simmons is widely regarded as a top tier talent in the modern game. As with any athlete of his ability, there are layers of technique we can’t begin to fully understand.

But there is also his glaring inability to complete the majority of the free throw attempts he earns. The shockingly low conversion for which he is notorious means that ‘earns’ is the wrong verb here. It’s truer to say that in the bigger games and the tighter fourth quarters, he is intentionally targeted for fouls in order to reclaim possession after he misses, all while conceding the least amount of points possible.

That’s when the downward spiral gathers momentum. There’s nowhere for him to hide when it’s five aside and it becomes apparent that the fans in the expensive play-off seats can’t bear to watch as another pass ends up in his nervous hands and another illegal contact inevitably follows. For context, never in the history of the NBA play-offs had a player’s rate of success from the free throw line been so low.

A pattern emerged as the stakes got higher: the widely respected Philadelphia coach Doc Rivers was left with no option but to take one of his best players off the court during crunch time. Whether he was on or off the court in the final quarter, it was car crash viewing for the neutral and it became difficult to decide which Simmons facial expression looked more forlorn — the one approaching the free throw line for another wayward attempt or the one sitting on the bench, overcome with confusion and helplessness.

Thus began the countdown to a departure from the city that fell out of love with him, more akin to the negotiated release of a hostage. It is excruciating, it is ongoing and the recriminations have become more and more public and unseemly the longer it has all been dragged out.

As pre-season began, the player, pushing for a move elsewhere with the support of the most powerful agency in the modern game, went with the nuclear option and declined to come to work.

“I’m not here to babysit,” his team mate and fellow number one draft pick Joel Embiid said when quizzed on the drama 10 days ago, just before the start of the new season.

“At this point, I don’t care about that man, honestly. He does whatever he wants. That’s not my job.”

When Simmons eventually showed up, he did so with such little interest that he was suspended from the squad for a day. His refusal to take part in a defensive drill forced his coach’s hand and Rivers sent him home.

He subsequently told his bosses he wasn’t yet “prepared mentally” to take the court and the speculation went into overdrive about the inner workings of the young star’s mindset as did the appeals for empathy.

Not that Knicks fans were too interested in any compassion. There is absolutely nothing unique about how schadenfreude and emotional abuse overlap at the top level of sport anywhere in the world. It’s difficult to be on the side of a young man rich beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

But the depth of disdain across Philly is matched only by the number of former pros queueing up to give Simmons a piece of their mind.

One of Doc Rivers’ former charges, Boston Celtics legend Paul Pierce, called the Sixer an “a–hole”, pointing out how extreme the situation would need to be for Rivers to resort to as drastic a step as banishing any player from the squad.

Whatever happens from here, Ben Simmons faces an uphill battle to recalibrate and salvage his career. It would be a crushing fall from grace for a generational talent and a case study in the importance of mental well being for athletes graced with the rarest physical gifts.

• @JohnWRiordan