Ben Simmons spent Independence Day working with NBA trainer Chris Johnson out in Los Angeles. He’s actually been out there for about a month now I believe, and Johnson is a guy who has trained Jimmy Butler, Jaylen Brown, Harrison Barnes, and Victor Oladipo, among others.

Johnson’s recent Instagram story gives us a view of him and Dwyane Wade standing under a basket, then it pans left and we get literally half a second of Simmons shooting a free throw:

That’s it, like less than one second.

But when you freeze it, I see some bend in the knees there. I see a slightly different starting motion before the release, which we were deprived of. Wah wahhhhh.

For comparison, here’s a Ben free throw from his rookie season, after the jump:


It was stiff, wasn’t it? It just didn’t look like a natural motion, mostly upper body and no legs.

He came back a few months later with a slightly different form, which looked like this:

That helped Simmons up his foul shooting percentage from 56% to 60% during his sophomore NBA season. He went to the line 5.4 times per game this year (avg. 34.2 minutes) vs. 4.2 times per game last year (avg. 33.7 minutes)

By the end of the season, here’s how his free throw looked:

Ben had some good nights and some bad nights from the line.

When you watch him warm up pregame, the biggest problem is that the ball still comes off with side spin, with the elbow flared out, which looks like this:

Right, so anyway, half a second of a free throw is more or less a joke, but this is super important moving forward, because the mechanics of foul shooting carry over to field goal shooting, and if someone can get Ben to just keep his elbow in, avoid the side spin, and get his knees bent, that’s the precursor to him becoming a serviceable shooter from 6-14 feet. If he can hit a reliable jumper from that range, he helps Joel Embiid, himself, and the Sixers as a whole.

It’s huge, his development as a shooter. Either he has to develop a consistent mid-range shot or Embiid needs to shoot around 34-35% from three point range to be able to solve the floor spacing and dig/double issues that have hurt the Sixers these past two seasons.