PHILADELPHIA — Ben Simmons may have missed his last playoff free throw with the Sixers.
Simmons will not report to Philadelphia 76ers’ training camp next week and prefers to continue his NBA career with another team, a person with direct knowledge of the player’s plans told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
The person spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because discussions of Simmons’ plans with the franchise have been private.
Simmons said after the season, “I love being in Philly.”
Not anymore.
Simmons, the No. 1 pick of the 2016 draft, is a three-time All-Star who had been paired with Joel Embiid as the franchise cornerstones as the Sixers chase their first NBA championship since 1983. Simmons, though, took the brunt of the blame for the top-seeded Sixers’ second-round exit in last season’s playoffs. He shot 34% from the free-throw line in the postseason and was reluctant to attempt a shot from anywhere on the floor late in games. That led to him spending critical minutes on the bench.
Simmons missed a stunning 10 free throws in Game 5 against the Atlanta Hawks and helped blow a 26-point lead in a loss. His defining moment, though, was in the Game 7 loss at home. With a chance to tie the game late in the fourth quarter, Simmons surrendered the opportunity to play postseason hero and passed on an open look at the rim because he was afraid he would get fouled.
Simmons did not attempt a shot in the fourth quarter in Game 2 against the Hawks. He did the same in Games 4 through 7 – going 0 for 0 in the final period. Not one single shot in the fourth over five playoff games.
Simmons just finished the first year of a $177 million max deal. He averaged 15.9 points, 8.1 rebounds and 7.7 assists over four seasons with the Sixers, who drafted him out of LSU, where he played only one season.
J.J. REDICK, the sharpshooter who was The Associated Press college player of the year at Duke before embarking on a 15-season NBA career, announced his retirement Tuesday. The 37-year-old Redick played with six NBA teams – Orlando, the Los Angeles Clippers, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Milwaukee and Dallas. He averaged 12.8 points in 940 regular-season games, and his 1,950 career makes from 3-point range rank him 15th in NBA history in that category.
Redick is Duke’s all-time leading scorer, with 2,769 points in his college career. He also remains Duke’s all-time leader in 3-pointers by a wide margin with 457 and free-throw accuracy at 91.2%. Redick averaged 26.8 points – another Duke record – as a senior, on his way to the AP player of the year honor, before being selected with the 11th pick by Orlando in the 2006 NBA draft.
He appeared in the NBA playoffs in each of his first 13 pro seasons, got to the NBA Finals with Orlando in 2009 and had a career-high 40-point game for the Clippers in an overtime win over Houston on Jan. 18, 2016. Injuries limited him to 44 games for the Pelicans and Mavericks last season, when he shot 37% — the second-lowest mark of his career – from 3-point range and averaged only 7.4 points, the first time he wasn’t a double-digit scorer in more than a decade.
RULES: Following suggestions from the league’s competition committee, the NBA has spent time this offseason teaching its referees how to handle it when offensive players are making nonbasketball moves with hopes of drawing contact from defenders – something that will be a point of emphasis this season.
Going forward, such plays will merit either a no-call or an offensive foul.
It falls under the league’s “freedom of movement” rules, which became a major talking point three years ago when the NBA made players cut down on grabbing and dislodging opponents – and that skewed toward helping the offense. By telling offensive players to stop making nonbasketball moves to create contact with opponents, that should help defenders.
The nonbasketball moves are the major focus of this week’s referee preseason meetings, which run through Thursday, and the new way of officiating those moves was put into action at summer league in Las Vegas last month.
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