He still got to the line during the playoffs sometimes, the opposing team sent him there on purpose. 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. And his evident fear of drawing fouls may make him less efficient in his scoring attempts. 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. 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. Still, it is not ideal when your second-best player is a late-game liability. 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. 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. 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. Simmons is nearly seven feet tall, with a muscular grace and the mind of a geometer. 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.
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. 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.
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(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. 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. First, the Philadelphia superstar Joel Embiid alluded to it, immediately after the game. 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.
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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.
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. 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. 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 Hawks led the 76ers, the top seed in the Eastern Conference, by four points. 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. 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. Ben Simmons’s decision to pass up an easy shot in the 76ers’ playoff loss seems to have opened a rift between him and the team.
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