Philadelphia 76ers: Brett Brown has failed Ben Simmons

The Philadelphia 76ers aren’t firing on all cylinders on offense and part of the blame for that has to fall on head coach Brett Brown.

There’s plenty of reasons why the Philadelphia 76ers haven’t lived up to expectations consistency this season. The list is pretty long, but one of the major issues is the lack of 3-point attempts from point guard Ben Simmons. His lack of outside shooting has caused major spacing issues on offense.

He’s gone 2-5 from downtown this season, but to be fair, this is the first year he’s actually made any of his 3-point attempts in his career. Still, he only has five attempts and it’s already January. Simmons isn’t really trying to stretch the floor despite the Sixers desperately needing him to.

This past December, head coach Brett Brown publicly challenged Simmons to shoot at least one 3-pointer per game. This was after he made his second 3-pointer on the season against the Cleveland Cavaliers on December 12, 2019. After Brown’s challenge, Simmons has only attempted one outside shot and that was a heave against the Denver Nuggets on December 10, 2019.

In other words, Brown’s plea for Simmons to take more three’s has fallen on deaf ears. When asked about Simmons’ lack of outside shots since his challenge, Brown said the following.

While certainly some of this lack of shooting has to be on Simmons, Brown isn’t blameless as he’s proclaimed in the video above. Obviously, its not known how hard Brown pushed the 6-foot-10 point guard to take 3-pointers outside of his public challenge, but it evidently wasn’t enough.

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For most players, a public challenge to do something would have been enough motivation for them to accept it, but that clearly isn’t the case for Simmons. Brown should have realized that he’s dealing with a very reluctant shooter and if he really wanted to get Simmons to take 3-pointers, he would probably have to push him harder than he would have regular players.

If Brown really wanted Simmons to shoot from downtown, he would have drawn up specific plays designed for his point guard to take those shots. In the video above, he’s indicated that he hasn’t done so up to this point.

While it’s understandable that Brown probably doesn’t want to have to force feed Simmons 3-point attempts, it might be the only way to get the point guard to take them at this point. Hopefully, once Browns starts drawing up at least one of two 3-point attempts for Simmons to take per game, the point guard will start to want to take more of those type shots moving forward.

Simmons’ failure to start shooting 3-pointers consistently isn’t completely on Brown, but the Philadelphia 76ers head coach could have done more to make his point guard take more outside shots. Brown could start correcting this problem by drawing up plays for Simmons to take shots from deep in the future.