Sixers: 3 holes team must fill once Ben Simmons is traded

Holes Sixers must fill after Ben Simmons trade: Lockdown on-ball defense

Ben Simmons’s defensive versatility, which proved valuable enough to earn him first team All-Defense honors last season and a second-place finish in Defensive Player of the Year voting, is also an asset the Sixers will struggle to replace in Simmons’s absence.

Last season, Simmons was guaranteed to provide above-average defense against just about any player in the league. From game to game, he’d go from matching up with Damian Lillard to bodying up LeBron James, and handle each defensive assignment with equal aplomb.

The symmetry in Simmons’s defensive assigments is uncanny. While on the court, he spent an identical amount of time assigned to both guards and forwards — he spent 47 percent of his minutes guarding each group, and devoted the remaining six percent to locking up centers.

He held opponents to just 40.9 percent shooting from the field and just 37 percent from beyond 15 feet; both marks surpassed the league average. He was particularly suffocating to wings on the perimeter, holding them to a putrid 24 percent from beyond the three-point line.

Simmons’s defensive intensity and hustle is nearly irreplaceable. Matisse Thybulle is an acceptable substitute, but what the Aussie provides in terms of steals and blocks is mitigated by his lack of sheer physical dominance. Thybulle can come up with impact plays, but he doesn’t totally erase players the way Simmons did with his size, length, and quickness.