Stephen A. Smith Furious With Ben Simmons, Who Some People May Have Forgotten Existed
Ben Simmons has played in six games this season, most recently appearing in a game on November 6 where he took just three shots, but grabbed 15 rebounds. Since then he's been out with a back injury and most people have kind of forgotten about him because it's still football season and nobody wants to talk about the Brooklyn Nets anyway. And that's probably how Simmons prefers things.
Unfortunately for Simmons, ESPN's Kane Pitman, who is Australian, caught up with Stephen A. Smith at the finale of the NBA In-Season Tournament over the weekend. He basically asked Smith what's up with that guy and SAS went off on a rant that started with "I'm completely disgusted with him."
"I don’t care at this point that he’s injured and the reason why is too much time went by when you were not injured when you were not playing. But you certainly made sure that your check was in your bank account every single month. We understand that mental health is a huge issue, it’s serious, it's not something to be diminished or maligned in any way. But you know something, you think about your money. Every time you turned around he thought about his money.”
Smith insists that he likes Simmons as a person, which is eerily similar to the way he's talked about Zion Williamson lately. There's just something about left-handed guys who can't stay on the court that realy irks Smith and it seems like it leads to him saying things he knows might actually be over the line, but he just can't help himself.
"You believe him and you understand not to sit up there and malign him as if you’re questioning the legitimacy of the injury. We’re not doing that. What we’re saying is we don’t care because if it was not that injury it’d be something else because over the last two to three years what you’ve shown us is an unwillingness to have a passion to play the game of basketball."
Smith also added that Simmons "treated basketball as if you were asking him to be on the front lines of a war or something," which is something he'd said before. Hopefully, both Simmons and Smith can find peace with Simmons' basketball life sometime in the near future.