Sixers

Jack McCaffery Has Set The Bar With The Worst Sixers Article

By Kyle Scott

Published: Jul 6th, 2017 · 11:23 AM EDT

---

Jack McCaffery may indeed be an idiot.

That’s the only explanation I can come up with for a paid human being writing about the impending point guard controversy between Ben Simmons and T.J. McConnell(!!!). Here’s McCaffery doing just that in the Delco Times today (if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it…):

[Starting Ben Simmons] could be the best plan. For the Sixers, who clowned around for an entire season just to be able to draft Ben Simmons, it had better be the best plan. It should be the best plan. Just about every basketball scout believes it will be the best plan. Chances are, it will be the best plan.

But it doesn’t have to be the best plan. Yet that’s what happens when an organization slips its professional pride beneath a flimsy instruction manual. It becomes hypnotized. It begins to doubt what it is seeing, and instead begins to recite what it has been made to believe. It starts to value an idea over success.

Just to be clear, what you read was a newspaper columnist planting the seed that the consensus number one overall pick last year who has LeBron-like playmaking upside shouldn’t be just granted a starting role because T.J. McConnell might… actually be better?

Brown did attempt to pair the organization’s back-to-back No. 3 overall draft choices in the same frontcourt, but quickly realized that Joel Embiid and Jahlil Okafor could not play together. He used Nerlens Noel when he could. But when he couldn’t, well, that was too bad for Nerlens Noel. So the Sixers’ coach has shown that he will stray from the process. And that’s why it will be fascinating to see how long he can keep McConnell bottled while trying to prove to the rest of the world what apparently only Australia (and certainly not the SEC, NCAA, LSU or NBA) knows: That Simmons is already in the lobby at Springfield, just waiting for his plaque to be engraved.

Yes, yes, I imagine Brett Brown is losing countless hours of sleep trying to come to terms with the fact that he will be sitting McConnell on the bench while that pesky little superstar with unheard of size and skills learns the ropes.

But while McConnell is not a special shooter, Simmons has some kind of outside-shooting phobia. And McConnell battles, while Simmons bolted school before LSU could consider an NIT invitation, then sat out an entire season with an injury that should have taken three or four months to heal. And McConnell was sixth in the NBA in steals last season, eighth in assists and a proven end-of-the-game handful for opponents. Can Simmons duplicate that?

Probably not. McConnell set the bar so high that the 6’11 Simmons will never be able to reach it. He shouldn’t even try.

There will be plenty of opportunity for both. There are 48 nightly minutes, the occasional injury, the change-of-pace nature of the sport. If the Sixers are lucky, they have two very good young point guards. Good teams are deep. But playing-time distribution is not the issue. The issue is the danger of being so invested in an idea, in a marketing ploy or in a process that has become a professional sickness.

A marketing ploy! Ben Simmons is a marketing ploy!

By training camp last year, any suggestion that McConnell would have marginalized veteran Sergio Rodriguez before the All-Star break would have been ridiculed. But players win opportunity. McConnell — a major-college force, by the way, at Arizona, not some feel-good novelty act — is one of those players. He has shown it with every finish at the rim, every flawless execution of a late-game play, every dive across the sideline to prevent a ball from leaking out of bounds.

Simmons, though, is not Rodriguez. He is a sales lure, a brand, a reason for the networks to reserve premium time for the Sixers, an idea, a concept, a belief. So he is going to play. Plenty.

Poor T.J.– the mom and pop shop who’s getting cucked by the big brand that is Ben Simmons.

It can all work. And it can work quickly. But that will require the head coach to do what it takes to win games and not just to front for a theory. Brown has shown that willingness. For too many reasons, though, it will be tougher this time.

Theoretically speaking, McCaffery is a moron.

Never mind the fact that comparing Ben Simmons to T.J. McConnell – who is admittedly a lovable player and I think can earn a spot in this rotation – is like comparing a PS4 to a Game Boy, or that this column should age so deliciously well that it may one day supplant John Smallwood’s Thaddeus Young boy toy fan fic – my favorite part of this whole thing is the fact that Jerryd Bayless, who the team loves and who oh by the way PROJECTS TO BE THE BACKUP POINT GUARD, wasn’t mentioned once. NOT ONCE. Not one time, in this roughly 1,000-word heaping pile of column making the non-existent case for T.J. McConnell to take minutes away from Ben Simmons, did McCaffery mention the guy who will actually be the backup point guard. Does he even know he’s on the team? That’s a serious question– I’m not sure McCaffery knows Bayless exists. Maybe it would’ve been a good thing to learn before writing a column about the positional battle, WHICH ISN’T A REAL THING!

H/T to (@BFit70)