Ben Simmons and the Acceptance of Failure

If Ben Simmons gets his way, and—despite the four years and hundred and forty-seven million dollars remaining on his contract—never plays for the Philadelphia 76ers again, the last shot he took for the team will, fittingly, be one he didn’t want to take: a free throw. He took that foul shot this past June, against the Atlanta Hawks, with a minute and forty-eight seconds left in the fourth quarter of Game Seven of the second round of the N.B.A. playoffs. The Hawks led the 76ers, the top seed in the Eastern Conference, by four points. Simmons had just poked the ball away from Atlanta’s budding superstar, Trae Young, and, as he collected the steal, Simmons was fouled by another Hawk, Kevin Huerter. The refs awarded Simmons two free throws—his first of the night, a remarkable accomplishment of avoidance for a player who has the ball in his hands as often as Simmons does, and whom, in previous games, the Hawks had been targeting. Minutes before, with the 76ers trailing by two, Simmons had spun into open space under the basket, and then passed the ball rather than risk drawing a whistle. Now he was finally at the foul line. He made one of the two free throws, raising his success rate for the series to a historically bad thirty-four per cent, on seventy-one attempts.

In the minutes, days, and weeks of recriminations and speculations that followed, Simmons’s decision to pass instead of shoot appeared to create a rift between him and the team that widened until it couldn’t be bridged. First, the Philadelphia superstar Joel Embiid alluded to it, immediately after the game. Then the team’s coach, Doc Rivers, when asked whether Simmons could be the point guard for a championship team, committed the cardinal sin of honesty, by saying that he didn’t know. (He’s been trying, very hard, to walk that comment back ever since.) Philly fans started referring to the moment, often in anger, simply as “the Pass.” But it was only the most eye-popping example of Simmons’s shot-avoidance—in the seven-game series against the Hawks, Simmons, a three-time All-Star, had just three official fourth-quarter field-goal attempts, and none in the final three games.

Simmons’s allergy to shooting has been a known condition since before he was drafted by Philadelphia, with the first over-all pick, in 2016. And there were questions about whether an unusually big point guard who likes to run in transition and occupy the dunker’s spot would fit well with Embiid, a bruising half-court bully who often draws defenders into the paint. But it didn’t seem like an insurmountable problem: Giannis Antetokounmpo’s lack of a reliable midrange or deep shot didn’t stop him from winning back-to-back M.V.P. awards. Simmons is nearly seven feet tall, with a muscular grace and the mind of a geometer. Near the rim, he can be unstoppable; he doesn’t pass the ball so much as let it flow from his hands, slipping it through the smallest of spaces to his teammates. His size and agility enable him to defend any player anywhere on the court—he finished second in this year’s voting for Defensive Player of the Year. He and Embiid had great success during the regular season: the two had a plus-sixteen net rating when on the court together, one of the best of any pair in the league.

Still, it is not ideal when your second-best player is a late-game liability. The hope has always been that Simmons, at the very least, would improve his free-throw shooting, which has ranked among the worst in the league. Surely, someone who has the vision and skill to grab the ball under his own basket and toss it with precision to a streaking teammate under the opposite basket in one fluid motion, as Simmons has done, could learn to throw that same ball into a basket fifteen feet away. But it hasn’t happened. And his evident fear of drawing fouls may make him less efficient in his scoring attempts. The Web site FiveThirtyEight noted that Simmons’s free-throw rate had dropped as he started relying more on a hook shot—a shot that was effective in many situations but that perhaps signalled a wariness of driving aggressively to the hoop, where he might be fouled. He still got to the line during the playoffs; sometimes, the opposing team sent him there on purpose. Some of his free throws caught the front of the rim. Many were flat. In Game Five of the series against the Hawks, he took fourteen free throws, and missed ten. The 76ers lost by three. When asked what the issue was, he said that he didn’t know.

One of the preëminent themes of the N.B.A. in the past decade has been player empowerment: stars are exercising more and more control over where and when they play. Still, the Simmons situation is unprecedented. No one with so much time and money left on his contract has held out before. In August, Rivers, the Sixers executives Daryl Morey and Elton Brand, and the team’s co-owner Josh Harris reportedly flew to Los Angeles to meet with Simmons, in an effort to try to persuade him to play for Philadelphia this season. According to the Ringer, their pitch included the suggestion that he play many of his minutes without Embiid, in a role that resembled that of Antetokounmpo: the focal point of the offense, surrounded by shooters.

Simmons apparently rejected the pitch. (On Friday, ESPN reported that Philadelphia was withholding an eight-million-dollar paycheck that would have been due to Simmons had he shown up for training camp.) Still, I was reminded of an article I’d read some weeks before, on the Web site TrueHoop, written by David Thorpe, who, in addition to commenting on the game, serves as an independent coach to some N.B.A. players. Thorpe thought that Simmons could follow Antetokounmpo’s playbook—if he adopted Antetokounmpo’s fearlessness about attacking the rim, even if it meant drawing fouls. Antetokounmpo isn’t generally a good free-throw shooter, either; videos of him shooting air balls during the playoffs went viral. But Antetokounmpo seemed to shrug off any embarrassment. In the last game of the N.B.A. Finals, Antetokounmpo took nineteen free throws. He made seventeen of them, and his team, the Milwaukee Bucks, won the title.

I asked Thorpe what he usually did with N.B.A. players who struggled at the line and sought his help. He described several drills: one intended to make sure that the feet are positioned correctly, so as to line up the ball with the center of the rim; one used for triggering muscle memory, the way golfers do by taking phantom swings; one that involves intentionally overshooting the basket. He also said that he’d give Simmons a hug. Getting to the free-throw line is an essential tool for winning basketball games, and Simmons needs to be willing to get there even if, Thorpe said, he misses every free throw. (“Of course, you want to make them,” he added.) Players are allowed only six fouls, and the opposing team should try to draw them. “In the N.B.A.,” Thorpe said, “no one wants to foul out.” Plus, after a team has committed five fouls in a quarter, each additional foul brings free throws, no matter where on the court they happen—another crucial advantage for the foul-drawing team. There are great players—Shaquille O’Neal, Tim Duncan, Wilt Chamberlain—who shot terribly from the foul line while still leading their teams to titles. Simmons, Thorpe said, will “have to get comfortable with missing.”

That can be hard. “Ben loves to be efficient,” Simmons’s brother told ESPN’s Jackie MacMullan last year. “He wants to make the correct move—not the wrong move—and sometimes that’s a hindrance. You need to experiment with things, and sometimes you might fail. The acceptance of failure is something Ben needs to be comfortable with. That will come along through hard times, experiences of losing.” But, so far, the experience of losing seems to be having the opposite effect: he appears to be shying away from failure rather than embracing its educational potential. The latest report is that Simmons’s decision to leave Philadelphia was prompted by a conviction that he cannot succeed with Embiid, and that he needs a team built around his strengths. (Embiid, in response, sniffed, “Our teams have always been built around his needs.”) But, wherever Simmons ends up, he’ll have to deal with the experience of going to the free-throw line, where he has only ever been on his own.