Ben Simmons does not play in the NBA anymore. Sometimes, rungs of the broader NBA content mill will go through an irregular spin, and catch the story of his potential return to the league as something relevant, newsworthy; the kind of thing you’d write a whole article about. But Simmons, on his Instagram page, tells a very different story. While the league he seems to have left behind struggles into its second month of the 2025-26 season wracked with star injuries, he’s on a private yacht with exultant friends, riding jetski laps around them as they whoop and holler for him.
Simmons made a shade over $200 million from the Philadelphia 76ers and Brooklyn Nets, so yeah, the 29-year-old can do whatever he wants. He achieved only tiny amounts of what he was projected to be capable of on the hardwood, when Philly took him No. 1 overall in the 2016 draft, but the current sun-soaked aquatic joy he’s showing us would suggest that he’s not too bothered by that. Paralyzed first by the modern attention economy’s fixation on his personal deficits, then by back issues, his nine NBA seasons saw him take a mutli-dimensional beating that he’s all too happy to be done with.
It will not be surprising if, in the years to come, more players take the Simmons path. The sport burns through its players like never before, and while the money stays as good as it still is, the early exit ramp will only grow more appealing. While few will ever know the crosshairs of personal scrutiny Simmons (barely) endured—the words “coward,” “can’t shoot,” and plenty of other mean ones have repeated percussively in your mind as you read these paragraphs about him—all players have felt the weight of an industry that’s grown increasingly oblong with its commitments to broadcast companies, sponsors, and gambling corporations making up an industrial complex of financial pressure that will never let the 82-game season get any shorter, no matter what it does to the primary human bodies that make it valuable.
At the moment, nine of 2025’s 27 All-Star contestants—all in the ostensible primes of their career—are sidelined with various maladies. Three more have missed at least half of the season. That’s just one way of expressing how chronically unavailable the sport’s premier players are—it would be easy to construct an even more alarming index.
This is bad for business. We could prove the badness of the business layout, here, in a lot of ways, but I’ll go with a personal story: myself and a few friends are planning a voyage to Wisconsin, this Spring, to see the Milwaukee Bucks play the San Antonio Spurs. However, our trip is premised on the idea of seeing Giannis Antetokounmpo play against Victor Wembanyama. Neither are healthy or playing, right now. If they aren’t healthy or playing, then, either? We won’t go.
Probably millions of fans could tell similar stories. The amount of money not spent and energy not invested into a league that so consistently fails at producing its lead faces is basically immeasurable, so it’s hard to convince the powers that be to take the problem seriously; immeasurable, in their eyes, is theoretical. And the money that is spent on the NBA and that is invested in the league is actual. But that money is only real until it isn’t; last year, the sport’s player union had to give back profits they’d made, because the NBA fell short of revenue goals. We can’t definitively prove a connection between unavailable stars and revenue shortfalls, but who reasonably doubts that such a connection exists?
Why this is all happening is obvious: the players are doing too much. Not only is the season too long, but it’s made up of games that are played harder than ever. Whatever your catatonic ESPN uncle might tell you—speaking from a verisimilitude somewhere between airport terminal and dentist office waiting office room that he’s chosen for himself—the sport is more punishing than ever. Every player runs, stops, changes direction, jumps, and comes into contact with opponents at a rate not previously seen. They manage more actions, more tasks, more skills, and do so at a historically furious pace. 21st century analytics have pushed basketball strategies past their breaking points, and what’s breaking are the bodies saddled with carrying out those strategies.
There is no solution for this problem that allows for the season to stay as long as it is. No fitness or training regimens, no amount of spiritual toughness, no rule changes that wouldn’t take the game backwards. The human body—even the very best of them—cannot do what this sport is making it do. Not like this, anyway; not this often. In the long term, the NBA has two choices: it can somehow break and reshape the celebrity-dependent business model that has made it thrive for decades, and convince fans to root more fully for laundry, as NFL and NCAA fans often do; or, they will shorten the season, and plan for these nuclear biological exertions to exist in only the quantities that human physics allow for. In the meantime, they are still hoping for the core of their product to hold still, when everyone can see it moving.
