Philadelphia 76ers coach Brett Brown has moved Ben Simmons to power forward to accommodate Shake Milton, a G-League player and benchwarmer for most of his career who played well for a few weeks before the shutdown. Why did he not do the same for No. 1 overall draft pick Markelle Fultz when he had the chance?
No one considered Ben Simmons a team’s main ball-handler until Philadelphia 76ers coach Brett Brown decreed him to be their starting point guard before the 2017-18 season.
He explained his reasoning at a recent press conference.
"“It’s not like Ben came in and we had Chris Paul on the team or Damian Lillard on the team. We were young, and really not that good, so it was my decision: ‘You take the ball. We’re going to make you the point guard.’ It’s not like there was an established point guard that he had to bump out.”"
Until then Simmons had been thought of as a power forward. He was 6-foot-10, 240 pounds, and although an excellent ball-handler and passer, he (as we all know) did not shoot from outside. That was the position Simmons played in college at LSU.
Common basketball sense: Not quite big enough to be a center and with no outside shot = power forward.
But Brown had nothing to lose three years ago. The team was coming off a 29-53 season and their only true point guard was T.J. McConnell, a great locker room guy and role player but certainly not the point guard of the future.
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At the time, Brown’s move looked good. Simmons was named Rookie of the Year (despite some objections in Utah) and helped the Sixers go from doormats to the Eastern Conference semifinals.
Simmons became entrenched as the Sixers’ point guard — in Brown’s mind .
The following year the Sixers drafted guard Markelle Fultz as the No. 1 overall draft pick. Due to whatever, Fultz could not shoot from outside. But you do not make the first pick in the draft a simple substitute. That would make general manager Bryan Colangelo (and his assistant Marc Eversley, the current Bulls GM) look bad.
So to start the 2018-19 season (yes, this is only two years ago), Brown pulled J.J. Redick, one of the best outside shooters in the game and a player who worked well with Joel Embiid, out of the starting lineup and put Fultz in at shooting guard, even though he had physical problems shooting from long range.
Starting a backcourt of Simmons (won’t shoot) and Fultz (can’t shoot) in the three-point crazy NBA went about as well as expected.
Fultz started 15 games (in which the Sixers went 9-6) before Redick was back in the starting lineup. A few games later, McConnell played in front of him in the second half of a game and Fultz was pulled off the team by his agent (for health reasons officially) and never played for the 76ers again. He was eventually traded to Orlando.
Most Sixers fans are not pining for Fultz to return, even though Orlando is absolutely thrilled with Fultz’s development as a point guard (even though his 3-point shooting percentage is even lower than when he was in Philly).
But if Ben Simmons was the point guard for the foreseeable future, there was no place for Fultz to shine in Philly.
The future, apparently, has ended.
Since the 76ers have regathered in the NBA’s bubble at DisneyWorld for the final eight regular season games and the playoffs, Brown has had Shake Milton as starting point guard in practices, while Simmons has moved back to his old collegiate spot of power forward.
Simmons will still see some time as point guard, but it looks like Milton will be the one starting there.
Let me be clear, this is in no way trying to disparage Shake Milton. I am a big Shake fan and the development he has made from No. 54 pick in the draft to starter on a team with championship aspirations is amazing, and he should be fully complemented.
The move(s) to be questioned are with coach Brett Brown.
If, as it seems, Simmons could be moved to power forward (which he says he is fine with), why was this move not made two years ago when it became obvious Fultz could not play shooting guard.
That is a $103 million dollar question.
Two years ago, the Sixers’ starting power forward was Dario Saric. We all love ‘The Homie’ but he was undersized, a defensive liability and is now on his third team in two years. Moving Simmons in front of him would not have been so big a deal, and certainly would have been preferable to sitting a key offensive piece like Redick.
Now, Brown is benching starting power forward Al Horford, whom the team just signed to a huge four-year contract, to start Simmons.
The reasoning is that Milton’s great outside shooting (45 percent from three so far this year) is needed in the lineup and Simmons at the ‘four’ gives him more freedom to be involved in pick-and-rolls.
That can work, but the main point is that it looks like basically a ‘Hail Mary’ attempt by Brown to reconfigure a starting lineup known for its clunkiness. Why Sixers management, Brown and its analytics department thought a starting five in which no one is a major outside shooting threat would work in today’s NBA is a story for another day…
Moving your starting point guard to power forward with eight games left in the regular season (albeit, following a four-month delay) is a pretty seismic change in direction.
It is also a move that should have been made two years ago.
Fultz has proven to be a pretty good point guard with the Magic. He really was not bad in his brief time with the Sixers, except for the not being able to shoot a jump shot, and you could see his growth, particularly on the defensive end.
So time to play the ‘What if’ game.
If Brown had pulled the Simmons-to-power-forward trigger two years ago, the Sixers could have rolled out a lineup of Fultz-Redick-Embiid-Simmons and Robert Covington with Saric off the bench. If Covington and Saric are still traded for Jimmy Butler, that makes the starting lineup even more potent.
If you have Simmons at power forward, that means you do not trade for Tobias Harris and the team still has ace shooter Landry Shamet and a bunch of draft picks. You also do not sign Horford in the offseason and now have the cap space to bring back Redick and add some good bench pieces.
Butler probably still leaves as he and Brown did not get along, but sliding in Josh Richardson is fine as you have Redick, Shamet and Milton to provide outside firepower.
You also have a team that is young (outside of Redick) and can grow together. Instead of fiddling with the lineups and, as Brown put it, dealing with three different teams last year, you would have roster continuity, an important factor in future success.
Would the Sixers have beaten Toronto with the Fultz as point lineup? We will never know, but it would certainly have left the SIxers with more options and cap flexibility for the upcoming season.
But two years ago, Brown saw Simmons exclusively as a point guard. We will see if he will pay for that error (possibly with his job), or maybe it is not too late.