Michael Wilbon was not the biggest fan of the Process.

He once said the Sixers’ rebuild took eight years and also famously claimed that he would take Brice Johnson “100 times out of 100” instead of Ben Simmons, a tweet dating back to March of 2016.

Putting that aside, and regardless of his overall feelings on Simmons, I thought this opinion on ESPN’s Get Up! pretty much hit the mark this morning.

Pull the volume bar up:

Wilbon:

He is a great player, and I know he has more to add. He’s not a complete product. People act like players don’t evolve now, like they’ve got to show up and be a finished package. I’ll take Ben Simmons on my team any night, particularly last night.

I think the part about evolution is spot-on. We know, of course, that Ben’s lack of a jumper is a liability, and that was certainly the case in the Boston series last year. It’s been the case throughout this season in certain scenarios. The Sixers, to their credit, put Ben in different situations last night, some smart screening and rolling plays, for instance, that got him easy looks at the basket.

We also have to take a step back and remind ourselves that Simmons is 22 years old, an NBA sophomore handling the ball on a team with incredibly high expectations, expectations that I think were accelerated due to the wonky timeline of the Process, a rebuild that created a time frame of 3.5 seasons separating 10 wins from the understanding that anything less than the Eastern Conference Finals would be a disappointment.

If you go through the numbers of other “non-shooters” who went on to become very good NBA players, of course they weren’t lighting the world on fire at age 22. This is somewhat of an arbitrary exercise, of course, but I always see these names brought up in regard to this topic, and here’s what each of these players did at that age:

Giannis was in his 4th NBA year at age 22. Rondo was in his third and Kidd his second.

Here’s how each of those players did at age 23:

Giannis and Kidd took significant leaps at this age, and Antetokounmpo came into the league much earlier, so he’s got a head start on Simmons when you look at two different development curves. Kidd went on to become a 35% career three-point shooter while getting his field goal percentage to 40. He wasn’t hitting at either number as a rookie or sophomore. And after Boston won that title, Rondo went on to four-straight All-Star games, which took him from season four through season seven.

So yeah, there’s plenty of room for Ben Simmons to grow, and Wilbon is right, we probably talk too much about what he can’t do instead of what he can do.