Ben Simmons Is Everything You Want Him to Be. Is That Enough?

One night last year, Ben Simmons threaded a pass through two backpedaling defenders in transition, and then finished another possession with a ferocious dunk. Picking a favorite between the two plays depends on your inclination—whether you prefer the audaciousness of basketball or its charming subtleties.

Watching Simmons play is intriguing. His skill set is so varied that he escapes positional categorization, and he has come along at just the right time and place. Positions are growing increasingly fluid and meaningless, anyway. At 6-foot-10, he is more a point guard than power forward, a left-handed serrated knife who can cut his way anywhere on the floor. He looks to pass first, and often. He lopes down the court, gaining steam as he dribbles, turning defensive rebounds into Vine-worthy fast breaks as soon as he grabs the ball.

The more than 50 NBA scouts and executives who watched him make those two plays against Marquette in November in Brooklyn might have felt spoiled to even get to see both those abilities—skilled playmaking and dominant scoring—on display in the same player. But that's why they had come to see Simmons, the next big thing in basketball, last year's top high school recruit, now a freshman at LSU, and in about six months the likely No. 1 overall pick in the NBA Draft. A prospect who is drawing comparisons to some of the sport's greats and whose flaws have not yet dissuaded many from moving him off that pedestal.

"His ability to play positionless basketball and like a positionless basketball player are all attributes that I would imagine any team would love to have," said Rod Higgins, the former Charlotte Hornets general manager.

"I don't think you put any parameters on a player like that right now…. The beautiful thing about a player like that is that you don't really know. There have been the LeBron James comparisons, and LeBron can play pretty much one through five. Magic Johnson, when he was rolling in LA, he played pretty much all the positions. It sounds like Ben has the ability to—it's a lot of pressure to say LeBron and Magic, but when you see some of the things with his passing and his ability to guard probably each position on the court."

Yet, Simmons isn't intriguing just because he is an athletic marvel; he is a marvel at LSU. At a time when top recruits seemingly face a binary decision—attend the NBA incubator at Kentucky or enter Coach K's gravitational pull at Duke—Simmons chose a football school in the SEC with a middling hoops program, one that is now just 8-5 despite a season in which their star player is averaging 20.5 points, 13.1 rebounds, and 5.4 assists per game.

The fact that Simmons landed in Baton Rouge is a reflection of both his personality and his unique path. He is competitive but sometimes needs prodding. He chooses the greater good when self-assertion would suit him, and even his teammates, better. It is trademark for Simmons. Players as gifted as him rarely come at his size, and budding stars like him don't usually come from Australia.

"He would rather line up against Kentucky and play against them than play with them," Liam Simmons, his brother, said. "That's no disrespect to that program—it's an unbelievable program—but that's just the way he's wired. He loves that competition. He loves the challenge."

His father, Dave, is a basketball player whose career took him from the Bronx to Melbourne. Four of Ben's siblings played basketball; a fifth rowed. Liam played collegiately and is now an assistant coach at Southwest Baptist University. His sister Olivia played at Arizona State.

Simmons's family was a primary influence on his game. Dave and Liam coached him on a local youth team from age 10 until he was 12, and Simmons would pick off information from them as he matured. They formed the example for how he came to play—although David Patrick, an LSU assistant and Simmons's godfather, says that Simmons takes after Olivia's game most.

"He's adopted his own style and swagger on the floor," Liam said. "He's adopted my dad's physicality and his mindset of just competing. He's got that New York kind of creed where he don't care who's on the floor and where you came from, he's going to come at you. He's got that in him. And he's got that Australian savvy where he's going to make the pass if the guy's open and he's going to talk to his teammates and he's going to be really vocal. He's got a really nice mix of New York, your dad's tough, from the Bronx, Rucker Park–type juice. And he's got that Australian laid back, relax, no moment's too big for me, I want my team to do well kind of mentality."

Simmons has walked that fine line on the court since coming to the United States. He spent three years at Montverde Academy for high school, where he integrated himself into a program stuffed with amateur talent, and played a summer for Each 1 Teach 1, a Florida AAU program, where he was the unquestioned star. Now Simmons is trying to revive a program on his shoulders. LSU has had intermittent success. They made the Final Four a decade ago, and that was 20 years after their last trip. Even Shaquille O'Neal couldn't lead them to sustained glory.

O'Neal believes that Simmons will end up being one of the top three players ever for the school, along with himself and Pete Maravich. When he met Simmons for the first time in September, O'Neal gave him his phone number and told him to call any time but refrained from offering advice. If Simmons needs any, he can reach him any time.

"I didn't want to be one of those LSU alums, 'Do this, do that'," O'Neal told VICE Sports. "He's a great player.

"He's doing fabulous. Kudos to coach [Johnny] Jones for giving him the freedom to let him play his game because if he'd have come up in my era he probably would have been stuck at the four-spot. But coach Jones lets him showcase his abilities. He's going to be fine. Once he gets a Steph Curry–like shot he'll probably be the best next great thing."

That shot is one of the flaws in Simmons's game, at least for now. At times, he is hesitant to shoot, passing up open three-pointers; he can be reticent even as defenders sag off him.

That has been a constant throughout his life. Simmons is such a willing and intuitive passer that he forsakes his own shot.

"He reminds you a little bit of a Magic Johnson–type player," said Kevin Boyle, his coach at Montverde and the high school coach for Kyrie Irving and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist. "Just able to get everybody else involved and not have to score a lot of points to make a major impact."

The push and pull over how aggressive Simmons should be is unending. Boyle admits that it might have been better for Simmons to be more selfish at Montverde—that making the "best play" was not always the best decision.

Same thing in AAU. In one game, against another top AAU team and Allonzo Trier, another top recruit in his class, Simmons was benched. His coach, Steve Reece, Jr., thought he was too lackadaisical: he had barely scored and been burned defensively.

When he was substituted back into the game, Simmons exploded. He finished with 37 points and 15 rebounds, Reece says. When the game was done, Simmons walked over to Reece to boast: "Is that good enough for you, coach?"

In NBA circles, there is some question whether Simmons can be the dominant force on the team that chooses him. This is a wart, but it's not ugly enough to drop him from his perch atop the draft board.

"You talk about the alpha male—the Kobe, the MJ, the Magics and the Birds and the Isaiahs and all those types of personalities in the locker room—that's something he's going to have to establish," Higgins, the former Charlotte GM, said. "Is he suited to be the first line guy? Or you know the whole Batman-Robin concept. Who will he be that way? If he's going to be a superstar, either role is pretty important to championship basketball."

O'Neal dismissed any criticism of Simmons being too passive as "nonsense." Like everyone else, he believes that part of his game will come. Higgins lines his critique with a simple understanding: Simmons is still the presumptive No. 1 pick and it would take something unforeseen to change it.

"Ben is not the Kobe Bryant mentality," Reece said. "He was taught the right way to play the game…. If it's the right play, he's going to make the right play and that's the right way to play the game. But at times there's no one in the country that can guard him. As coaches, we're like, 'Go ahead and dominate.'"

Still, it's hard to overlook that Simmons is preternaturally savvy. When he drives to the rim, he can see defenses bending toward him and find shooters along the perimeter. When he decides to finish, he does it right-handed to draw more fouls and free throws.

Defensively, Simmons is an already intimidating shot-blocker, combing athleticism with an innate sense of timing. Boyle still revels at the play he made at Montverde, charging from behind half-court to block a layup by Grayson Allen, now Duke's star guard.

"It almost looked like he couldn't get there," he said. "Like it almost didn't look mathematically possible for him to recover from that distance and the speed of the pass."

Even Simmons's interaction with referees is NBA-ready—he chatted them up often enough at the Barclays Center and threw sheepish looks if he thought they missed calls.

Stars can get away with such things, and right now Simmons is the brightest in college basketball. Even Shaq stands in his shadow. When they met on the LSU campus, O'Neal admits, "he was the star."