Ben Simmons was\u00a0one of the most talented basketball players of his generation. He was so\u00a0talented that he sleepwalked to the first pick in the 2016 NBA draft off raw talent alone. He was so talented that he was an All-NBA Third Team Player in 2020. He was a genuinely elite NBA player.<\/p>\n
But for all Simmons possessed in talent, he lacked tenfold in his intangibles.<\/p>\n
Simmons\u2019 character was never a mystery to those deeply acquainted with him. Signs showed themselves early on\u00a0in his career, both before and during his poor-performing season at Louisiana State University. But his character somehow didn\u2019t dissuade the Philadelphia 76ers from drafting him first overall,\u00a0despite leading league executives questioning his perseverance and dedication.<\/p>\n
But nobody could have seen what these observations would foreshadow. Simmons refused to shoot the ball during games, even though he was clearly capable of hitting shots when nobody was watching. He had terrible lapses in key moments during the Sixers\u2019 2021 playoffs loss to the Atlanta Hawks, an experience that seemed to break him spiritually. But what Simmons did afterwards augmented his shame and crystallized it: He refused to communicate with the organization about his mental health issues and ignored the basic contractual obligation of showing up to meetings, games and practices. Amidst this chaotic backdrop, he never figured out his jump shot, and over his last three active seasons, back ailments destroyed whatever elite talent remained.<\/p>\n
Simmons has suffered from the worst case of performance anxiety seen in professional basketball. Now, the latest news of his career has broken. Last Thursday, NBA insider Mark Stein reported that Simmons parted ways with his agent\u00a0Bernie Lee. Tuesday, it was revealed that Lee\u00a0fired Simmons after he refused a contract offer from the New York Knicks. Seemingly, Simmons now intends to retire and has no interest in playing basketball.<\/p>\n
During my sophomore year Intro To\u00a0Ethics class with David Denby, we discussed whether or not we have a moral obligation to maximize our talents. My gut was \u2014 and still is \u2014 that we are. Yet I still feel the emotional weight of Professor Denby\u2019s question, because I realized simultaneously how difficult it actually is to maximize your talents and how easy it was to impose standards on others that you yourself cannot follow. And for this reason I can think of Simmons as\u00a0a failure while recognizing the sheer difficulty of the transformation we expect from him as somebody endowed with elite talent. The parasocial nature of sports fandom shouldn\u2019t obscure that it can be impossibly hard for some people to overcome mental blocks under immense pressure.<\/p>\n
But the thing with Simmons was that he had already developed the majority of his basketball game \u2014 he could just never find the last few pieces. We may not be NBA players, but we all have potential that could bear great fruits if we give it the water and sunlight necessary to grow. And where we don\u2019t have ability, fear often lies \u2014 and this is what lies between us and our goals; we must learn to overcome it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Developing fearlessness is the intangible of life and basketball that makes or breaks some of us, and it broke Ben Simmons before he could reach his potential.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ben Simmons was\u00a0one of the most talented basketball players of his generation. He was so\u00a0talented that he sleepwalked…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137313,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-137312","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nba","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}