Ben Simmons: That Night in Philly

Before he became a cautionary tale, Ben Simmons was prophecy incarnate.

The 6'10" Australian phenom arrived in Philadelphia as the #1 overall pick in 2016, a point guard trapped in a power forward's body.

He moved with liquid grace - Magic's vision channeled through…Magic’s frame, reading angles others couldn't see, threading passes through shifting tides of defenders.

He won Rookie of the Year. He made three All-Star teams. He was the cornerstone of "The Process," a long-con rebuild designed as Philadelphia's path back to basketball relevance.

Simmons and Joel Embiid were meant to be twin titans. One owned the paint; the other orchestrated like a point-center savant.

The shooting limitations seemed a minor footnote in the larger story being written. The Sixers constructed an entire architecture around what he could do - defend all five positions, run in transition, manipulate geometry, create from chaos.

Greatness was not a question of if, but when.

But pressure creates undertows invisible from shore. And in Simmons, something quietly frayed beneath the surface - a reluctance to shoot, a free-throw percentage that cratered in big moments, a pattern of fourth-quarter silence that fans waved off as youth. Until the night they couldn't anymore - when possibility collapsed into a single, defining moment.

Game 7. Eastern Conference Semifinals. June 20, 2021.

Philadelphia trails Atlanta 88–86 with 3:30 left.

The Wells Fargo Center trembles with anxious energy - 22,000 fans suspended in shared breath.

Simmons catches the ball near the block. He spins past Danilo Gallinari. The lane unfolds - wide, quiet, waiting. And still, he pauses. For a heartbeat, it's all there: size, speed, the rim within reach. Redemption within grasp.

Then: hesitation.

A flicker of doubt crosses his face. Instead of rising, he passes - backward, reflexively - to Matisse Thybulle, who's fouled and hits just one of two free throws.

The collective inhale transforms into a bewildered exhale. Disbelief ripples through the stands like a wave pulling back from shore. Simmons avoids eye contact in the huddle. The Sixers never recover. They lose by seven. And in those lost points lies the collapse of something larger than a game plan.

Later, Simmons will say:

"I just assumed Gallo was going to come over my back."

Seven words. A rationalization for the irrational - one that no longer belonged to him alone.

The postgame quotes land like knives.

Joel Embiid: "We had an open shot. That was the turning point."

Coach Doc Rivers, asked if Simmons could be a championship point guard: "I don't know the answer to that."

Trust, once the foundational pillar of the Sixers' rebuild, dissolved in real time.

These weren't subtle signals between teammates who had navigated years of shared struggle. They were exits.

Fans voiced their betrayal in more primitive language - booing, burning jerseys, hurling trash. One teammate later said, "It was like watching someone drown when they're supposed to be the lifeguard."

Philadelphia, once Simmons' promised land, no longer offered refuge. It turned cold, then quiet.

And the silence that descended between him and Embiid - once Philadelphia's brightest promise - screamed louder than any headline.

On the stat sheet: 5 points, 13 assists, 8 rebounds. Not awful.

But numbers can't measure hesitation.

This wasn't just a foregone dunk - it was a public unspooling.

The "yips" - that cruel psychological phenomenon where an athlete suddenly loses basic motor skills - had arrived.

Chuck Knoblauch's throws. Rick Ankiel's pitches. Markelle Fultz's jumper. Now Simmons joined the lineage.

The deeper truth is that Simmons' greatest strength - his intellect - became a weight pulling him beneath the surface. He didn't trust his body. He calculated instead of reacted.

He passed the ball, yes - but more crucially, he passed on himself.

Inside, the weight had been accumulating. Years of criticism. Free throws turned into rituals of dread. A father's ambitions tangled with his own.

By the time he stood alone under that basket, the architectural foundation of "The Process" that Philadelphia had built its future upon had already cracked - not just organizationally, but within him. The structure was too compromised to bear what had been built upon it.

The fallout came fast.

Simmons skipped training camp. The team fined him. Rumors swirled, patience thinned, and by February 2022, he was traded to Brooklyn for James Harden.

His struggles, now front-page material, collided with a broader cultural moment in summer 2021. Simone Biles stepping away from Olympic competition. Naomi Osaka declining press conferences. Mental health in professional sports was finally cracking the veneer of toughness culture - but while those women were met with understanding, Simmons mostly faced derision.

"I was in such a bad place where I was like, ‘Fuck, I'm trying to get here’ and you guys are, like, throwing all these other things at me to where you're not helping. And that's all I wanted, was help.”

The moment forced uncomfortable conversations about race, masculinity, and the conditional empathy extended to male athletes.

Simmons, unwilling or unable to perform on command, became a screen onto which society projected its expectations - and punishments.

What happened that night wasn't just a physical misstep but a psychological crossing point.

Simmons' hesitation transformed him from rising star to cautionary figure.

For many, he became an easy punchline, the shorthand for choking when it matters most. For others, a mirror reflecting our own moments of paralysis. Because what happened that night wasn't unthinkable. It was deeply familiar.

Who hasn't felt the undertow pull them down at the worst possible moment? Forgotten the words mid-presentation? Choked on the cusp of something important?

In Simmons' hesitation, we saw the moment when talent alone isn't enough - when belief fails the body, when the weight of expectation drags us beneath the surface of our capabilities.

In 2025, the clip still circulates.

But maybe now, we can watch it with new eyes. Less mockery. More understanding.

Not just of Simmons, but of ourselves - lost in a sea of self-doubt, passing on opportunities out of fear, and slowly learning to rebuild whatever process we once believed would carry us forward.

Remember that scene…

In Monsters University when Mike - bright-eyed, hardworking, and full of relentless self-belief - stares into his own reflection and has to concede that he’s not scary.

That he never was.

The scene is quiet. No tantrum. No catharsis. Just a realization that lands like a weight: I’m not built for this.

Wazowski is the poster child for a very specific emotional phenomenon - one that’s rarely named, but instantly recognizable to anyone who’s ever chased a dream with everything they had, only to realize the dream didn’t want them back.

It’s not impostor syndrome. It’s not failure. It’s something far more personal.

We’ll call it the Earnest Misfit.

An Earnest Misfit isn’t someone who fakes it, or phones it in.

They aren’t arrogant or delusional. In fact, they’re often the opposite - disciplined, driven, and deeply sincere. They believe in the thing. They study, strive, sacrifice. They build an identity around the pursuit. They do the work.

And then, one day, the work reveals a truth that contradicts the entire narrative: I may not be enough - not because I didn’t try hard enough, but because I never had the thing that mattered most.

In Mike's case, it's fear. He just doesn't generate it. In Ben Simmons' case, it was belief - in the moment when all his gifts needed to culminate in a single act of aggression, he froze. He passed. Not because he didn't care, but because something inside him no longer trusted the leap.

This isn’t just poetic sadness. It’s a psychologically identifiable rupture, built on two overlapping frameworks.

This theory suggests that emotional well-being hinges on how well your abilities, personality, and values align with your environment. The most capable person can feel inadequate if the setting rewards traits they don’t naturally possess. Think of Mike: he has knowledge, heart, work ethic. But the monster world rewards terror. And he can’t give it.

So the misfit isn’t a failure of effort - it’s a mismatch of wiring.

This creates a dissonance not just in performance, but in identity. Mike isn’t just bad at something. He’s bad at the thing he’s built his entire self around. Simmons, too, wasn’t just critiqued for a play. He was stripped of the identity that had defined him for years: chosen one, point-forward genius, cornerstone of The Process.

Proposed by psychologist E. Tory Higgins, this theory posits that distress arises when there’s a gap between your actual self and your ideal self. For an Earnest Misfit, that gap becomes unbridgeable at the moment of reckoning. The ideal self says: I am meant for this. The actual self says: But I’m not enough to make it real.

This rupture doesn’t always result in drama. Often, it results in silence. In stillness. In the kind of self-withdrawal that looks from the outside like indifference, but from the inside feels like grief.

That’s what makes this concept so invisible. The Earnest Misfit doesn’t melt down. They melt away. They start to disappear from the thing they love - not because they want to quit, but because it hurts too much to stay.

But here’s the part no one tells you: after the grief comes relief.

Not fitting stops being a failure. It starts being freedom. You no longer have to contort yourself to match the myth. You get to ask a better question: What shape am I actually?

Mike finds a new door - literally. And he still matters, just differently than he thought.

Simmons hasn’t found that path. Not yet. And many of us haven’t either.

But if the Earnest Misfit can grieve the dream, they can begin the harder, braver work: building a new story that fits the actual self. Letting go of who you were supposed to be isn’t the end.

The only process you have to trust is your own.