The 6’10” (211cm) point guard was the No.1 pick for the Philadelphia 76ers in the 2016 NBA draft. He is the only Australian to make the NBA All-Star game and was this week named in the NBA’s All-Defensive team.
He is also supposed to be the man who will finally put the Boomers on the podium at the Tokyo Games after several heartbreaking near misses at Olympics and world championships.
The problem is, Simmons has become the butt of all basketball jokes.
Posters have started appearing on telegraph poles, asking the question: “Missing: have you seen this man?”
Why? Because in the Sixers’ past two playoff games – a pair of defeats to the underdog Atlanta Hawks – Simmons has yet to score a single point in the final quarter and just set an NBA playoff record for missing free throws.
The 24-year-old clanged on 10 free throws from 14 attempts in Thursday’s loss to the Hawks. He has missed a record 45 shots from the line during the playoffs – that’s 10 more than the entire Atlanta team – and is shooting at an embarrassing 32.8 per cent from the line.
Nobody in NBA playoff history has been as bad as Big Ben.
The obvious strategy employed by Atlanta is to foul Simmons as soon as he gets the ball – sometimes even when he doesn’t – and make him go to the line. Hawks fans jeer him as his haunted face looks forlornly at the rim. Sixers fans cheer ironically on the rare occasions he actually makes one.
It is now such a weakness for the Sixers that coach Doc Rivers can’t keep him in the game.
“When Ben makes them, we get to keep him in. When he doesn’t, we can’t and that’s just the way it is,” Rivers admitted on Thursday.
His confidence is so low he appears too afraid to shoot the ball at all and was a complete non-factor whenever it mattered this week. Will the same thing play out when the Sixers and Hawks meet again on Saturday morning? We fear the answer.
And so to the Boomers, who threw away an 11-point lead against Spain in the 2019 FIBA World Cup – a game that would’ve put them into the gold medal match. They lost in double overtime with the Spaniards going on to become world champions. The Aussies tossed away another lead in the bronze medal game against France – a team they had already beaten earlier in the tournament – and finished fourth. Painfully, they were also fourth in the 2016 Rio Olympics. Australia has a well-rounded squad full of selfless team players. Patty Mills is the closest thing we have to a guy who demands the ball when the game is on the line. We need more of them but Simmons doesn’t play that way.
Boomers coach Brian Goorjian this week named a 19-man Olympic squad chock full of NBA talent, including Mills, Joe Ingles, Matthew Dellavedova and Simmons’s Sixers teammate Matisse Thybulle. Goorjian will cut that down to 12 before the Olympics begin.
Simmons hasn’t played for Australia yet and many had hoped he is the one to get us a medal. Now the fear must be that his confidence is so low he may just decide to skip the Olympics altogether and spend his summer practising his free throws. He sure needs to.
Get a grip
Yet another glaring example of the differences between the cultures of cricket and baseball arrived this week when star Tampa Bay pitcher Tyler Glasnow blew up about Major League Baseball’s decision to crack down on the use of foreign substances on the ball.
Glasnow was happy to admit he’d been using sunscreen (illegal) and rosin (legal) his entire career to get a better grip on the ball but stopped doing so ahead of an MLB crackdown. He now has a very injured elbow (a partial UCL tear and flexor strain) and has slipped from favouritism in the race to win the Cy Young award as the MLB’s best pitcher.
Glasnow has little doubt the crackdown is to blame.
“I have to change everything I’ve been doing the entire season. Everything out of the window, I had to start doing something completely new,” Glasnow said. “And then I’m telling you, I truly believe that’s why I got hurt.
“I am sore in places that I didn’t even know I had muscles in. I felt completely different. I switched my fastball grip and my curveball grip. I’ve thrown it the same way for however many years I’ve played baseball.
“I had to put my fastball deeper into my hand and grip it way harder. Instead of holding my curveball at the tip of my fingers, I had to dig it deeper into my hand.
“I’m choking the shit out of all my pitches.”
While using anything other than sweat and saliva on a cricket ball is strictly prohibited (even that is banned since Covid struck), baseball officials have tended to turn a blind eye. If a pitcher is using sunscreen to get a better grip, that’s been OK. The suspicion now is that foreign substances are being used to increase spin.
So why have a crackdown on foreign substances? Because batters are struggling to hit the ball.
The league’s strikeout rate is on track to increase for the 14th consecutive year, from 17.5 per cent in 2008 to 24.6 per cent this season. The fans want home runs, not strikeouts.
Stat of the week
History will be created when the swimmers step on to the blocks for the women’s 200m freestyle at the Tokyo Games. This week defending Olympic champion Katie Ledecky won the event at the US Olympic trials, defeating 2012 Olympic champ Allison Schmitt.
The 2008 200m gold medallist, Italy’s Federica Pellegrini, will also be on the blocks, making it the first time in history three past champions will meet each other in an individual Olympic swimming event.
Our tip? None of them. Look for Aussie Ariarne Titmus to knock off all three. Arnie set an Australian record of 1min 53.09sec to win the 200m at our own Olympics trials this week – that’s more than two seconds faster than Ledecky, who swam 1:55.11. Titmus was just 0.11s behind Pellegrini’s world record, which was set in 2009 with the Italian wearing a now-banned textile swimsuit.
BC’s tip of the week
Followers of Brendan Cormick’s tip were able to collect last Saturday. Mark Of The Man was a late withdrawal, meaning all money wagered on the horse was refunded. So, we live to fight another day and BC is back on the Jamie Kah bandwagon.
In the nervous 90s as she chases 100 Melbourne winners for the season, Kah rides Red Can Man (Flemington R9, No.1). Now with trainer David Brideoake, the WA galloper has been wowing trial watchers. Brideoake says there is “a good race in the horse”.
mcloughlins@
theaustralian.com.au
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We need to talk about Ben Simmons.