dougthonus wrote: I think you're letting them off a bit too easy. After the comments when they made a gazillion stories about it, they didn't come back the next day and go "Man, the press is full of crap, you completely took that out of context, Ben is our guy, how dare you!" Instead the 76ers went out and aggressively shopped Simmons around the whole league before not finding an offer they wanted then trying to make nice.
I've written about this a bunch of the GB and I'm boring myself jabbering about it again, but in short I don't think that's a reasonable interpretation of the comments. Really not trying to defend Doc, but it's been driving me a little crazy that thousands of usually smart people are apparently intentionally misreading the evidence that we have on hand because it makes for a more interesting storyline. Doc's clip is very clear, he starts by blaming a ton of other things and then a reporter brings up Ben and he says 'I don't know about that question, and I don't want to talk about it now.' It's over right after that and it's very very clearly him saying 'no comment.' Haven't had a single person look at the whole clip on the GB and honestly defend the other take on it, and I honestly don't think there's anything to work with to make that . Sure he could've said 'I won't answer that question' but he clearly is trying to say that, and he shuts down the question within about 10 seconds. And again he blamed a TON of other stuff in his postgame interview.
The other stuff you're talking about also seems like it's people turning off their brains to make this more of a tense two-sided drama than just a little flameout by Simmons. It's hard to consider it offensive that they shopped him around the league after he'd already requested a trade, and after we've been told so SO many times by every NBA player interview, podcast, book, etc that players always think of the league as a business and that they could be traded at any time. Also remember that this was right after Simmons had what any reasonable person would call another bad series/disappearing act in the playoffs when the Sixers needed scoring. Simmons had a bad series that showed (again) he's not a good fit, he didn't even acknowledge that fact (again) and said he played just fine, then he demanded a trade and started an unprecedented holdout despite the fact that his team is a contender that's built around him for years. I'm fine with Simmons saying he didn't like the negativity and I don't even judge him for it, it's just really weird that people keep saying 'yeah and he's damn right too!' He's just running from a tough situation, let's just let that be what it is.
Here's what I agree with: those clips gave something for the media + social media to take them out of context, which helped along the anti-Simmons tidal wave that happened for the couple weeks after the Hawks loss. That was probably the nail in the coffin, and it makes sense that a guy like Simmons didn't see any reason to hang around and risk more of it.