Did the stars improve?
It doesn’t take a keen eye for basketball to realize Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid are immensely talented. They are two of the best players in all of basketball. Their superhero talents are jaw-dropping, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have shortcomings.
Ben Simmons has a famous reluctance for shooting jump shots. He’ll shoot the occasional elbow jumper, but his willingness to attempt it varies and it comes with his less-than-stellar mechanics. Simmons has been working on his shot with his brother all summer long. He needs to dabble with his shot in the preseason.
Much like Fultz, he needs to capitalize on the lack of pressure in the preseason and let it fly. An apparent improvement in his free throw form should hopefully end the “Hack-A-Ben” strategy and increase his overall scoring. Simmons with a shot would be a delight to any Sixers fan, and an unpleasant premonition for Celtics fans.
Joel Embiid’s conditioning was a talking point towards the end of the Boston series. His conditioning wasn’t at a high level, but the most paramount attribute Embiid needs to fix is his obscene amount of turnovers. High turnovers come with high usage rates, but he needs to clean up his efficiency. As if he wasn’t already a gigantic handful in the post, a focus of his offseason was to improve his “bully ball”.
Both of the Sixers’ stars proved they can single-handedly dominate games, but their improvements are to be best experimented in the preseason.