Basketball

Lauded for his supreme talent and then publicly castigated for squandering it, Australian three-time NBA All-Star Ben Simmons knows the perils of getting your heart’s desire. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.

Ben Simmons’ disenchanted demise from the NBA

Unsigned NBA player Ben Simmons shows off his latest sporting love: competitive fishing.

Credit: Instagram

In another context, we might well celebrate a man – however tinged with envy that celebration might be – who, well before the age of 30, has realised a personal ambition that is famously difficult to achieve, earnt hundreds of millions of dollars and who now spends a good amount of his time fishing.

Our notional man has achieved all of this with great talent, sacrifice and no criminality. If he became disenchanted with his dream years after its realisation, and bored with the demands of the industry that employed his talents, then we might say, well, that’s his business and wish him well in his early retirement and his search for marlin.

This man is not notional, however. He is flesh and blood, and he also happens to have been – and may be again – a professional athlete, a class of person whose talents the public often stakes weird claims of ownership to, and whose private disenchantments we can feel personally insulted by.

This man is Ben Simmons.

It’s perhaps foolish to invite sympathy for this accomplished, supremely fortunate man who’s dated models and who, for a good if indeterminate percentage of NBA fans, is also somewhat flaky of character.

Allow me to not so much cultivate your sympathy, then, as merely to establish the context of Simmons’s current retirement/malaise/hiatus/sadly premature athletic twilight (the jury’s out).

Ben Simmons is surely Australia’s most talented basketballer ever. An American college star, he was only the second Australian (after Andrew Bogut) to be picked first in the NBA draft. In the most hyperbolic appraisals, he was spoken of as the next Magic Johnson – a freak in ball handling and an even better defender.

Before Simmons’s NBA debut in 2017, Australians had collectively played more than 3000 games in the league – and not one had scored a triple-double. Simmons had one in his fourth game.

Simmons was the NBA’s Rookie of the Year, a distinction not bestowed upon any other Australian. Nor has the honour of being an NBA All-Star – Simmons was made one in three consecutive seasons.

Now, there have been harder Australians in the NBA (Bogut), more likeable ones (Patty Mills) and more humble ones (Joe Ingles). There have also been better shooters (almost everyone), players more adaptable to a team’s structure (again, almost everyone) and players more committed to the national team (everyone).

Simmons’s reluctance to play for the Boomers – he has played only twice for the senior national team and both appearances were almost half his lifetime ago in 2013 – has soured many current and former players on him. Invariably, Simmons would excuse himself by citing injury and/or rehabilitation – the man’s back has been serially cursed – but sufficient time has passed that most saw a convenient pattern of excuses masking an insulting indifference.

In the previous three seasons he was rostered with an NBA team, Simmons played just 66 games – he played 81 in his first. For the 2025-26 season, he has no team. So when it was reported last month that Simmons had bought a majority stake in a professional fishing team, the mockery from fans and pundits was immediate: here, surely, was proof of his indifference to pro basketball and a sign he would never return to the hardwood.

There are at least three ways, suggested by different parties, of explaining the spluttering arc of Simmons’s career. The first is argued by Simmons himself: it’s all about injuries. He has been wretchedly unlucky with them and his current hiatus is about physical rehabilitation – getting his body “bulletproof” before a return.

The second argument is that Simmons, despite his elite handling, passing, driving and defensive pressure, was doomed by both technical and mental vulnerabilities that were mutually reinforcing. The technical vulnerability is his shooting (it’s terrible) and the mental is his refusal to make shots in games. This includes a comically near-total refusal to attempt three-pointers, a defiance of several coaches’ encouragement and an allergy that’s easily exploited by the opposition. (In 383 regular season games, Simmons has attempted only 36 three-pointers – and none since the 2022-23 season – an almost unbelievable stat for a contemporary point guard.)

A variety of skills means a variety of options, which means the defence can be kept guessing about the most efficient way to cover the floor.

This neurotic refusal found its most notorious expression in 2021 when, during the Philadelphia 76ers’ high-stakes playoff match against Atlanta, Simmons seemingly yielded to panic and surrendered an open dunk under the basket. This, his 76ers teammate Danny Green agreed on the All the Smoke podcast last year, was the beginning of the end for Simmons.

Fellow players were shocked, fans appalled. After the game, which Philadelphia lost, his coach spoke indelicately about Simmons’s potential. This insulted Simmons, who refused to train with the team as the wrath of a fanatical city intensified. Eventually, after a lengthy stand-off, he was traded to the Brooklyn Nets.

In retrospect, this does indeed seem to have been the beginning of the end for Simmons, whose time in New York City was marked by extended absences and mostly insipid performances when he did play.

In the space of just a few years, Ben Simmons went from being an All-Star to a cultural punchline – a man memed and mocked with uncommon savagery. To critics, and there are many, Simmons is something of a moral delinquent – a man who committed the treason of abandoning both his gift and his teammates in the clutch.

It’s true that Simmons has often seemed childishly stubborn, bitterly defensive and subject to awful fluctuations of confidence. But there’s a third way of looking at his career, suggested by his former agent Rich Paul at the start of the year, which returns us to the notional man from the start of this piece. “Everything that Ben wanted to happen for Ben happened for Ben,” Paul said. “He was the No. 1 pick in the draft, he was the Rookie of the Year, he was a perennial All-Star, he was All-NBA and he got the max contract.

“There’s two ways to go about this. Either you love what the game brings you, or you love the game ... some guys get up that mountain and [are] saying … ‘Good. I got up there. Now I’m going to go back down.’ Some guys are like, ‘Okay, now I want to go higher,’ and that’s the difference.”

Rich Paul was politely suggesting Simmons began descending long ago. Everything Ben wanted, Ben found. Now, to the likes of Michael Jordan or the late Kobe Bryant, such alleged indifference and early loss of appetite would be considered a profanity and moral deformity. But it’s worth adding that both these men, in addition to being unimpeachably great, were also monsters of self-obsession and vindictiveness.

That one might not have the stomach that they had, nor the capacity to ruthlessly confront adversity and transform it into high-octane fuel, is not a lack of virtue. Their greatness, for one, often required the sacrifice of decency.

As it is, there’s probably something very particular about the public’s appraisal of an individual’s athletic talent and ambition. We might forgive someone having ambition but little talent, but rarely will sympathy flow for those who have it the other way round.

Why won’t we, as we might for my imaginary man, say “Good on you” and leave the chap to abandon his talent and its associated rigours and pursue a life of leisure?

The answer, I think, is a sense of collective ownership over an admired skill that’s bestowed upon precious few. I’m reminded of the scene in Good Will Hunting when Chuckie (Ben Affleck) confronts Will (Matt Damon) about his friend’s infuriating reluctance to cultivate and professionally pursue his mathematical genius. The confrontation happens as both men are working their hard, menial construction job. “Fuck you. You don’t owe it to yourself, man,” Chuckie says. “You owe it to me. Cause tomorrow I’m gonna wake up and I’ll be 50, and I’ll still be doin’ this shit. And that’s all right. That’s fine. I mean, you’re sittin’ on a winning lottery ticket. And you’re too much of a pussy to cash it in, and that’s bullshit. Cause I’d do fuckin’ anything to have what you got.”

Something like this objection to another’s timidity and wastefulness of talent exists, I think, for Ben Simmons – as well as frustration with his presumed inability to acknowledge his flaws and to fortify his ego from the slings and arrows of public derision.

The comparison isn’t quite right, though. Simmons has pursued his dream – and found it. Has he fully realised his talent? Probably not, though perhaps one generous way to consider his career so far is this: to achieve Rookie of the Year and three All-Star selections as a point guard who won’t shoot might suggest that he’s overachieved.

Simmons has told the world he will return to the NBA. About this there’s plenty of scepticism. Either way, he found the summit and was amply rewarded for it. The cost might now be public ridicule as he returns to base camp and goes fishing. Some are happier with doing that than others.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 24, 2026 as "Gone fishin’".

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