Ben Simmons is right about Doc Rivers. Nobody wants to say that part out loud. It does nothing, though, to get Simmons off the hook for the play that started all of this.
In Being Ben, the ESPN documentary out Sunday, Simmons finally says what he's clearly been carrying for years. "How did I feel? I was like, 'What a piece of shit,'" he says of Rivers. He adds that "it was clear that he just didn't want to lose his job," and that when things got hard, "people throw people under the bus."
Look at Doc's actual record and tell me Simmons read him wrong. Rivers has lost more Game 7s than any coach in NBA history, sitting at 6-10 in winner-take-all games, and two years after the Hawks series he coached Philadelphia into another one. The Sixers held a 3-2 lead over Boston, failed to close it at home, then got run off the floor 122-88 while Jayson Tatum dropped 51. He was fired inside 48 hours. A coach with that history, standing at a podium, pointing the finger anywhere but at himself, is exactly who Simmons describes.
And Doc did point. Asked after the Hawks loss whether Simmons could be the point guard of a championship team, he said, "I don't know the answer to that right now." It was worse than a flat accusation. A man handed the chance to back his player in the hardest moment of that player's career chose to leave the door open and let the room walk through it. He never cleaned it up that night. He knew what he was doing.
This is where Simmons loses me completely. All of that is true. None of it touches the actual problem. In the fourth quarter of a one-possession Game 7, Simmons had a clear path to the rim and passed it off to Matisse Thybulle, who made one of two free throws. For the series he averaged 9.9 points on 15-for-45 shooting and managed just three fourth-quarter shot attempts across the entire series. You can hate Doc Rivers and still see that the Sixers lost that series because their point guard was too scared to score.
Five years on, Simmons has made an entire documentary partly to relitigate this, and the headline he produced is calling someone else a coward. He's got the receipts on Doc. He has not said one honest word about the dunk. The closest he comes is framing himself as the guy who got betrayed, which is a strange position for the man who declined the easiest two points of the night.
Doc was wrong to protect himself instead of his player, and his résumé says it's a habit with him. Simmons deserves the blame he's now trying to shovel back onto his coach too. Both men looked at the wreckage of that series and decided the problem was the other guy.
The difference is Doc got fired, moved on, and never pretended the Game 7 losses didn't happen. Simmons is still standing over that passed-up dunk, insisting the real villain is the man who wouldn't lie for him.
