Will the Sixers Have a Rookie of the Year Even Without Simmons?

Ben Simmons will likely not be a Rookie of the Year contender due to his recent injury. Do the Philadelphia 76ers still have some likely candidates?

When the Philadelphia 76ers received the news that Ben Simmons had fractured a bone in his foot, there was massive disappointment in the fanbase and the organization surrounding the upcoming season. The top overall pick was going to miss a ton of time, and this was the third consecutive year that the highest overall pick for the Sixers was going to miss at least 20 games in their debut season.

Another narrative that took place with the injury that wasn’t really discussed was the likelihood that Simmons was likely not going to win Rookie of the Year anymore, since he was going to be missing a very important part of the season, and quite possibly a majority of the season.

While there’s still a chance he might win Rookie of the Year next year if the murmurs about him being left out until next year are even a bit truthful, there’s almost a zero percent chance that Simmons will be the name announced at the end of this season.

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It seems like that should take the Sixers out of the running for Rookie of the Year altogether, but there are a few names who could be the underdogs of the season and come out strong to prove their worth for the award.

Besides Simmons, the Sixers are debuting three new rookies. Only one of them was drafted this season (Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot) and the other two were drafted two years ago in 2014.

Luwawu is almost certainly out of the running for the award. While he is a good player with decent skills (that will also compliment Simmons very well in the long run) he doesn’t seem like he’s going to get the minutes needed to have success large enough to even really get a vote for the ROY award.

On the other hand, the Sixers do still have Dario Saric and Joel Embiid eligible for the award.

Embiid, at first glance, seems like he won’t be a player in the running. He hasn’t played competitively in two seasons, which would indicate that his game is off. In all reality, that may be true. But we could consider that the Sixers were very meticulous with his recovery and his shot improvement while he was out recovering from his foot injury.

The Sixers sent him to Qatar, brought in big name sports medicine people, and poured a ton of resources into Embiid. There has never been a player more prepared coming off of this injury than Embiid. He could take all that and use it to his advantage.

Once he gets past the initial rust that comes along with coming off of not playing for a long period of time, he could be an explosive rookie. Whether or not he’s on the scale of Karl-Anthony Towns from last year or not is unknown, but I think he might do enough to at least get a foot in the door of the conversation with ROY.

The other rookie is Dario Saric. Saric may even be more advantaged than Embiid, and perhaps more advantaged than any other rookie in the league. Saric has been playing pro basketball since he was a teen, and after the Sixers drafted him, he didn’t play for two seasons.

During those two years, however, he was playing with the Anadolu Efes in Turkey, building his game to a point where the Sixers would feel confident bringing him over. The draft-and-stash experiment is a fairly new one, and Saric may be one of the most successful subjects of the experiment.

Saric developed his shooting and took it to a new level each season, and is coming into the NBA with solid passing abilities, and also decent stretch four tendencies.

Saric has something almost none of the other rookies have in this league — pro experience, and two years of that after being drafted into the NBA. That’s important, and a lot of people aren’t realizing that.

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With Simmons out, and Saric being one of the players that has the potential to kick-start the offense with passing, there’s reason to believe Saric will get a lot of minutes, and a lot of opportunities to prove his worth not only from beyond the arc, but in the “point-forward” realm as well.

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While Simmons being gone does make the Sixers’ chances at getting a Rookie of the Year this season much smaller, we shouldn’t completely rule out the Sixers having a ROY winner in their possession. In fact, if Simmons does sit out this whole season, the Sixers could have consecutive ROY winners on their roster.