Ben Simmons is doing the redemption arc again, and I already know how it ends, but this time there’s a detail that’s making me stupid all over again: a Western Conference team put an actual training camp invite on the table before he’s proven anything on an NBA floor.
He’s expected to be a full participant with “zero restrictions” in the Boomers’ player-led minicamp in Melbourne starting Monday, according to ESPN’s Marc J. Spears. Zero restrictions is doing a lot of work in that sentence for a guy whose body has been the actual headline for a while now.
The minicamp part is the easy read. Simmons is a Melbourne kid who paid his own way home, he’s chasing a roster spot for the 2028 Olympics in his own city, and he last wore the green and gold back at the 2013 FIBA Oceania Championships. He’s sharing a gym with Josh Giddey, Dyson Daniels, and Patty Mills. Inviting him back costs Australia Basketball nothing and buys them a ton of local goodwill before a home Games. I’d do the same thing.
Then there’s the NBA part, where I lose my composure a little. A Western Conference team has offered Simmons a real, non-guaranteed training camp invite, and he’s reportedly open to signing for the minimum just to get back in a building. That’s a front office spending actual roster math on him, not a courtesy phone call. Camp bodies get cut in September without a second thought around this league. Somebody in that building watched tape and decided the flashes are still recoverable, and that’s a different sentence than “we’ll see how minicamp goes.”
I want to be the responsible one here and I can’t quite pull it off. I’ve watched this exact hype cycle before: healthy again, motivated again, best shape of his career again, and then the calendar flips to October and he’s hurt or traded or logging eight minutes a night like he did against Denver in last spring’s first-round exit. The back surgeries piled up during his Nets years until he’d played in just 57 of a possible 164 games across two seasons, and Brooklyn eventually waived him outright. He landed with the Clippers off that wreckage, got into 18 games, and then sat this entire past season out trying to actually heal instead of rushing back again.
As a Rangers fan I already watched a wide-open free agency turn into a “nobody actually wants the damaged legend” situation this summer, so I’m not naive about how this goes for guys on the wrong side of 30 with a medical file. And this league isn’t shy about handing out comeback guarantees it can’t back up either. Simmons is just the version of that story where the guarantee comes from an anonymous front office instead of the player’s own mouth.
That’s the part I can’t wave off. A non-guaranteed invite gets plenty of guys cut before the lights come on, and Simmons has more false starts on his résumé than anyone else currently drawing an NBA paycheck.
Marc Spears posted the tweet that ruined my Sunday scroll:
https://twitter.com/MarcJSpears/status/2086624910718493058
I run a Tuesday rec league in Hoboken where I tell myself every single week that my jumper is finally back, and it never is, so I know exactly how dumb it is to keep believing somebody’s flashes are still in there. Doing it anyway.
