Who really is Ben Simmons’ closest comparison?

The rim divers

• Hassan Whiteside
• DeAndre Jordan
• Tristan Thompson

The problem with Simmons is that he’s so talented at ball-handling that anyone else in the league as talented as him typically is also talented enough to shoot threes, and the few that aren’t are smaller point guards like the ones I just named.

After I did those categories, I thought about trying to do it backwards: what if instead of thinking of players I thought were similar and then looking at their shot charts (which aren’t similar), I thought of people with similar shot charts instead?

Of course, the players with similar shot chars would mostly be poor shooting centers. I excluded some others like former Philadelphia 76ers player Nerlens Noel, Clint Capela, and Rudy Gobert because their charts all look pretty much the same as DeAndre Jordan and the same thinking applies to all of them. For comparison, I’ll re-post Simmons’ chart too.

DeAndre’s shots are actually TOO at-the-rim. Simmons can take jumpers within ten feet – DeAndre can’t even do that. He lives on dunks and layups, whereas Simmons has much more nuance to his game than that.

Whiteside takes more deep shots than I thought, by far. I expected his distribution to look like DeAndre’s but not so. Very curious. In any event, he certainly shoots from farther out than Simmons.

We’ve found it! A shot chart that matches! Thompson mostly shoots at the rim but he has the skills to score from other areas in the paint, and even will occasionally venture slightly outside of the paint for midrange shots.

Of course, Thompson is very different from Simmons, because apparently finding a player comp for SImmons is my Sisyphean task. Thompson is an incredible rebounder, even better than Simmons, but is nowhere near the ball-handler or passer. I’ve never seen a Cavs play start with the ball in Thompson’s hands.

Every player we looked at compared to the Philadelphia 76ers’ rookie is either a worse ball-handler, a worse passer, too small, or a better shooter, and usually a combination of these. I guess one could call him “a quite-poor man’s Lebron James except without a jumper” or “Rajon Rondo with even less of a jumper and the body of Hercules” but none of these are the perfect one-to-one comparison we were looking for.

Even when we find the perfect shot chart, the player logically doesn’t match with Simmons. I am sad now. On the bright side, I guess that does mean he’s as one of a kind as we thought he was.

Next: Sixers' ideal end-of-game lineups

Thanks again to Austin Clemens for the data, and be sure to head over to our friends at Nylon Calculus if you like this type of article, and join us next time on “Luke Swiatek writes 2400 words about the Philadelphia 76ers all to explain that he failed at answering a question.”