Matt Vautour: Celtics should stay out of the Ben Simmons business, which never ends well

Don’t do it.

The Celtics should forget they even thought about it. Pretend they were joking.

Run.

Not for a mid-level exception. Not for the league minimum.

The Celtics are rumored to be interested. They should not only steer clear, but they should hope the Knicks or some other Eastern Conference rival pulls the trigger. Because it will end badly. It always ends badly with Simmons.

This is a fragile time for the Celtics. With Jayson Tatum out and Kristaps Porzingis, Jrue Holiday, Luke Kornet and Al Horford gone, everyone’s on-court role is going to change or expand. Other players are going to see their leadership responsibilities grow.

That will create challenges on the best day. There aren’t many best days when Ben Simmons is around.

Simmons is incredibly attractive on a highlight film. Pick the right series of plays and moments and he looks like a Hall of Famer, a guy a team could build a franchise around.

If he’s healthy and buys in, he’s versatile at 6-foot-10. He’s a good defender. A solid rebounder and has real court vision and terrific switching potential.

But him being healthy is rare and him being fully bought in is rarer.

His career has been one long trail of disappointed fan bases, burned front offices and frustrated teammates.

The Celtics need only ask newly-acquired Georges Niang, who was on the Sixers during Simmons’ messy back injury/holdout in 2022.

“I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but the Ben Simmons thing. That pissed me off because guys are trying to make a living. I signed just a little over the minimum. (Playing with Simmons) is going to be great for my career,” Niang said on a podcast. “And then he was like, ‘I’m not playing’ and I’m like, what the (expletive). I’m like, ‘How the (expletive) am I going to make something happen?’ And then he was walking around the facility, and they’d be like, ‘What’s up, man?’ trying to welcome him back, and he’d be like, (nods), and that’s when I was like (expletive) this dude.”

But Simmons was torpedoing his own ships’ hulls before that.

Everyone ignored warning signs from the beginning. LSU underachieved in his only season there. They started in the preseason top 25 and missed the NCAA Tournament. Because Simmons’ numbers were good, coach Johnny Jones got the blame for the failure.

But the season established two things that that been the through lines of Simmons’ career. He doesn’t make his teammates better and he doesn’t really appear to like basketball all that much.

The Sixers weren’t scared. They took him No. 1 overall in the 2016 NBA Draft and planned their future around him. He was at the heart of The Process that the Sixers were asking their fans to trust.

That wasn’t their failure. He was the consensus, no-debate top pick. Every team in the NBA would have done the same thing.

It could have been the Celtics, who were in the lottery that year and turned out to be lucky not to win it. Boston picked Jaylen Brown, a franchise cornerstone and future NBA Finals MVP at No. 3 and the Sixers got six years of a franchise-denting headache and had to pay him $78,465,475 to endure that.

Given the enormous hype that accompanied his arrival, Simmons will go down as one of the most disappointing picks of all time.

After sitting out his first season with an injury, he was the rookie of the year in 2017-18 and All-NBA in 2019-20. But things cratered fast. He held out to open 2021-22 before the Sixers eventually traded him to Brooklyn.

The Nets have wasted a decade trying to cut corners with failed get-rich-quick schemes designed to avoid a rebuilding process. They’ve added aging superstars or talented but problematic players in hopes that adding the correct combinations of wrongs together could, in fact, make a right.

They paid Simmons $123,789,153 to prove that wrong. That’s $211,000 per point that he scored for them.

The Nets had zero postseason wins during that stretch. Simmons was on the roster for two playoff series, but was injured for two first-round sweeps by the Celtics and Sixers.

The Nets bought him out last year. The Clippers, who have been good at turning other teams’ buyouts (Russell Westbrook, Reggie Jackson) into good players again, couldn’t do the same in a half season with Simmons.

Someone will sign him. Somebody will think they’re one with a magic skeleton key system and culture that will turn Simmons into the superstar he was supposed to be.

But history says they’re wrong. Simmons will aggravate his coach, frustrate his teammates and enrage the fans.

Let him do that somewhere else.

More Matt Vautour Columns

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Matt Vautour: Celtics should stay out of the Ben Simmons business, which never ends well

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