Ben Simmons won’t take his NBA bow until closer to the new year.
According to ESPN’s Marc Stein and Jeff Goodman, Simmons’s foot surgery will keep him out for approximately three months. That means he’ll likely be back in December at the earliest and possibly as late as January.
Simmons’s injury is being described as an acute fracture of the fifth metatarsal bone, the result of landing on Shawn Long’s foot during a Friday scrimmage. The Sixers were initially hopeful that he’d simply rolled his ankle, but this has obviously proven not to be the case.
Simmons gained weight during the offseason, but doctors don’t seem to believe it was a factor in the injury. Either way, it’s a huge blow – both on paper and psychologically – to a Sixers team that was just starting to think that all those draft picks were going to pay dividends.
