Philadelphia 76ers star Ben Simmons is in the news again. This time around, he’s being dragged into a scandal involving the Australian government and the national team over alleged threats from the former to withdraw financial support for the national basketball program. To make this narrative even juicier, the whistleblower here is former Golden State Warriors big man and Australian national team icon Andrew Bogut.
In a recent episode of his Rogue Bogues podcast, Bogut made some shocking revelations about Australia’s Victorian government allegedly threatening to withdraw $148 million worth of funding if the Australian national team refused to play Simmons in a couple of warm-up games back in 2019:
“The call was given to Basketball Australia [from the Victorian government], it basically said this: ‘If you don’t let Ben Simmons play these two games in Melbourne that money is gone, we are not giving it to basketball in Victoria,’ ” Bogut said on the podcast, via Keith Pompey of the SunHerald. “We will do our best to get that number as close to zero as possible, and you will never get another dime from the Victorian government again.’
“He [then Australian coach Andrej Lemanis] came to the group, said this is the situation we are dealing with … He said, ‘If we don’t let Ben play in these two games we are losing funding for grassroots.’ He said, ‘I can’t have that on my soul, in my heart, I can’t have that taken away from young kids’ development … I am letting Ben play.’“
To be clear, what Bogut is talking about here are two warm-up games leading to the 2019 FIBA World Cup. These were a couple of high-profile games against the United States, which apparently, the Australian national team did not want Simmons to participate in because of his decision to withdraw from the squad for the World Cup. The government, however, had other ideas.
Bogut’s claims were so scandalous that it even prompted an official statement from the government, which unsurprisingly, denied any and all claims pertaining to the alleged withdrawal of financial support:
”The Victorian Government made no such threat regarding the State Basketball Centre, which was a 2018 election commitment,” a spokeswoman for the Victorian government said in a statement to the newspaper. “The fact is, Ben Simmons played in neither game and notwithstanding that, all funding commitments by the Victorian Government towards basketball have been honoured and were never in question.”
As the above statement indicates, Ben Simmons actually ended up missing both games. He practiced with the national team but eventually skipped the exhibition matches against Team USA. Needless to say, this only made matters worse and made the optics even more deplorable.
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