25-under-25: Ben Simmons doesn’t need the 3-pointer

The Step Back is rolling out its 25-under-25 list over this week. Follow along with our rankings of the top 25 NBA players under the age of 25.

Anyone who followed the second round series between the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers this past season probably remembers one phrase that slowly took over the discourse on NBA Twitter.

Ben Simmons, the 2018 NBA Rookie of the Year, took 12 3s last season, regular season and playoffs combined. Two were from traditional 3-point range — the rest were end-of-quarter heaves. In the midst of the NBA’s 3-point revolution, one of the league’s new stars avoided the shot like the plague.

Celtics twitter got their jokes off as Simmons’ avoidance of the 3-point line manifested as a symbol of the 76ers’ struggles against the Celtics defense. But that spawned a larger topic of conversation this offseason – if Ben Simmons can’t shoot 3s, can he ever be more than he was in 2017-18? And as teams figure out how to scheme for what he’s good at, does that mean he’ll regress?

This is yet another topic that falls into one of the major logical fallacies of our modern NBA discourse. The thinking goes: Simmons doesn’t shoot 3s – therefore he is bad at them. He plays primarily as a ball-handler. The most successful ball-handlers in the league are good at shooting 3s. Therefore Simmons must become good at shooting 3s to be good at basketball.

We most commonly see this argument with lead guards when it comes to defense — even though time and again we see data that says point guard defense isn’t really that important for their overall value. But the argument that a player needs to develop his biggest weakness to become a complete player is becoming increasingly more common. Nikola Jokic needs to get better at protecting the rim. Al Horford isn’t an elite rebounder, so he must be a power forward. Simmons needs to shoot 3s.

But this is sports, played by humans — everyone, including LeBron James and Stephen Curry, has weaknesses that can be schemed for. Everyone has faults, but the best players are the ones that use other aspects of their game to marginalize those issues, even when they’re being attacked. So while Kobe Bryant’s advice that Ben Simmons needs to “rebuild his jumper completely” is super helpful, let’s focus instead on where Simmons can look to improve beyond his biggest fault.

Thanks to his rookie year roles and responsibilities, we have zeroed in on the idea of Simmons as a point forward, and therefore focus primarily on what he does with the ball in his hands. And while his passing vision and ability to finish off the dribble are incredible, the 76ers didn’t have the roster to bring out his off-ball versatility. Without Markelle Fultz being healthy, the 76ers really didn’t have a true secondary creator to let Simmons play in traditional off-ball roles for his size. With Fultz, an easier path to improved play from Simmons could be unlocking his skills as a cutter, using his rare athleticism and fluidity to generate looks without the ball in his hands. We often hear about Philadelphia needing shooters surrounding Simmons to be successful. But while that’s important, finding passers that can get him open looks at the rim is equally important.

Jackson Frank of Liberty Ballers had a great breakdown of how Philadelphia could use extra creators to unleash Simmons at the rim, and it’s particularly interesting to think of how Simmons could function as more of a pick-and-roll presence while playing small-ball five. While he only had seven possessions as a pick-and-roll finisher last season, this was a bigger part of his game at LSU, and while obviously the quality of competition is lower, this looks awfully pretty and hints at Simmons’ ability to use his speed to split pick-and-roll defenses.

Again, it’s a small sample size, but the numbers reflect this ability: Per synergy, LSU Ben Simmons rated in the 82nd percentile of NCAA forwards as a roll man, scoring 27 points on 22 possessions. Limited pick-and-pop opportunities also went well, putting him in situations where he could flare to the line, and then attack a recovering defender off the dribble. There’s also value in generating post touches for him out of these sets, where he can go to his move set or find kick-out options on the 3-point line. You can imagine the following play working well with Fultz dumping to Simmons on the short roll, then setting a screen to free J.J. Redick on the 3-point line:

We see the ultimate ceiling for Simmons in what another great player without an elite 3-point shot has done with that screening ability. LeBron James has emerged as one of the league’s most versatile screening threats, because the threat of all of the things he can do catching on a roll to the rim forces defenses to cave on the action, presenting open looks everywhere for teammates.

Simmons, with his legendary vision and more reliance on pick-and-roll possessions, could one day become a similar weapon. There’s even the threat that the 76ers could run 4-5 pick-and-roll with Embiid handling and Simmons as the roll man, an idea that sounds insane in theory but in practice is not far off with the right development steps from both.

The best part of Simmons becoming more involved as an off-ball threat is that it accomplishes the same root solution to the problem of Simmons’s lack of shooting in terms of offensive value. The goal of adding a 3-point shot would be to increase spacing on the floor, but Simmons can accomplish that through other means. His cutting already demands the attention of a help defender that has to focus on what he’s doing off-ball, and while he will never provide the vertical spacing of a Clint Capela or Rudy Gobert as a roll man, defenses still will have to collapse on Simmons thanks to his agility and footwork, and that would open up extra space for Philadelphia’s shooters around him.

Simmons refuses to shoot 3s, which makes him an oddity, but he’s still very, very good despite that. And while it would be nice to see him become a more complete offensive player by adding the threat of a 3-point shot, there are other avenues to accomplishing the same task that can make Simmons more valuable despite that. He may always be the coward that won’t shoot 3s, but Simmons has easy outlets to take his game to the next level anyway. And that’s terrifying for the rest of the league.