Ben Simmons and the Philadelphia 76ers are well within the confines of championship contention this year. The Sixers are first in the Eastern Conference with a 38-17 record. However, some remain unconvinced that they are truly championship contenders. Simmons is certainly not one of those people unconvinced.
In an interview with GQ, Simmons said,
“Exactly. You’re trying to trick yourself. Guys would be like, ‘yeahhh we could win.' An example would be, and I won’t say the team, a guy said to me, ‘damn, we just tryin’ to make the playoffs.' If you don’t even believe you’re going to make the playoffs, how you gonna win a championship? I feel like we genuinely believe we are here to win a championship. That’s the only reason we come in. That’s why we wanna dominate games. We wanna be the best team.”
When questioned about a narrow win against the Brooklyn Nets without Kevin Durant and James Harden, Simmons replied,
“Like, you feel me? [Laughs] That’s like saying, ‘Yo! I had 100 points.' But did y’all win? Nah. At the end of the day, nobody’s going to look at that. Yeah, Brooklyn came back at the last minute. Well, the starters were sitting down for a minute. You could also say KD, James [Harden] weren’t playing. But that wasn’t the game we played last night.”
Simmons shows the confidence here he is known for. The Sixers will need this confidence if they truly want to compete for a championship. Joel Embiid has had an MVP caliber season thus far and Tobias Harris is having the best year of his career. Even with those two and Ben Simmons, they lack the star power of their biggest competition. They will have to compensate for that lack of star power in the playoffs, confidence is the first step in that process.
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