The Philadelphia 76ers are going to look a lot different this upcoming NBA season. With Ben Simmons holding out and waiting to be traded to a new team, they will have a new starting point guard for the 2020-21 season.
While the team is hoping that Simmons will eventually return to the team, that seems extremely unlikely to happen at this point. Simmons isn’t with the team for the start of training camp, and that sounds like it will not be changing.
The Process, which Joel Embiid dubbed, is effectively over, and Ben Simmons wants nothing to do with the organization despite their insistence on holding onto him. At this point, while the 76ers don’t want to admit it, parting ways is probably best for both sides.
But why is Simmons so insistent on finding a new team to play for? They are a few bad bounces away from having two Eastern Conference Finals trips in the last three years, and who knows what would have happened then.
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The Athletic, a paid subscription website, recently shed some insight into why Simmons no longer wants to play with the Philadelphia 76ers.
“People who have intimate knowledge of how he sees this situation continue to insist that he’s done playing with Embiid. There’s nothing personal about this choice, it seems, but the 25-year-old Ben Simmons has decided that his career is better off without Embiid blocking the runways in the paint that he so badly needs to succeed.”
If Simmons feels that things have run their course in Philadelphia, that is okay. The team has found plenty of success during the regular season with this duo leading the way but has not been able to break through in the postseason.
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But, he could have voiced that in a manner that didn’t lead to so much animosity and bad blood seemingly being had between the two sides. It would seem that there is more to the story, and will we ever find out how much more, no one knows.
For now, all we know is that Ben Simmons has dug his feet in and wants to be traded to a new team as he feels things have run their course with this All-Star pairing of him and Joel Embiid.
