Ben Simmons is having a tough start to the NBA season, which is to be expected since he hasn’t played high-level basketball in more than a year. But other players attempting to come back after time away don’t face quite the scrutiny Simmons does teamed with Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving in Brooklyn.
Simmons is supposed to make that duo into a “Big Three” — but he committed 14 fouls and scored just 17 points in his first three games as a Net, fouling out of two of them. Simmons seems to be playing with little confidence, a situation that tends to make itself worse as it goes.
See the air ball layup below.
Hall of Famer and TNT talking head Shaquille O’Neal doesn’t seem to have a lot of sympathy for Simmons, but that’s not to say Shaq doesn’t have empathy, or understand where Simmons is.
“I understand exactly what Ben’s going through,” says Shaq, whose Achilles heel as a hooper was a dreadful free throw percentage that often saw him mocked by fans for his futility.
Of course, Shaq kept fighting to make the fans “shut up” — but he admits (“confession time,” he says) that the foul shots weighed heavy on him and he was scared to go to the line.
Still, before Shaq shows his empathy for Simmons’s plight, he takes a pretty good dig at the struggling Brooklyn star. “I want to apologize for being late. I was sick,” Shaq says. Punch line? “Sick of watching Ben Simmons play.”
