Exits: The tomb the Sixers built

The Process as purgatory, rebranded.

You can have too much history.

You can be mired and hobbled by a past that drags at your every step, you can have the past you keep around your head and shoulders like a shroud, a veil of imagined protection, filter out the light and air you need to live.

There is history as comfort. A fallback and shorthand. The easy silence that comes when you’ve borne out the best and worst with and of somebody. History like a body you can call to memory, the particular dip of a muscle, arc of a bone, the faint raise of a scar, moles like topography in a land otherwise unmapped and only held in the memory of hands. The pitch of a laugh, how something so fleeting can ricochet and rattle around your head long after the person who was so quick to always burst out with it is gone.

This is the kind of history you can rove around in, happily, lost to yourself. Though the difficulty still comes in getting out, learning to hold your breath just long enough to stay submerged without straining or coming up with the bends. History can just as much be a cruel and cutting thing, waiting there grinning in the dark to kick out the flimsy constructs of support like some crude child’s trap — a box with a stick wedged under to catch a small animal — so the full weight of all your carefully compartmentalized memories come crashing down.

The too much of it goes both ways, burdened or beholden. To get all the way free of history is impossible so the best thing to do with it, even if we’re all prone to bouts of its excess, is to use it like a corrective lens. I just got fitted for glasses but I swear I’d use the same analogy if I hadn’t, because to see Ben Simmons squinting at the net from so far out, overcompensating by passing, wild volleys to his teammates there, right under the basket but hardly ready, makes me think about the way he’s seeing that particular world he’s walking around in.

When Simmons sees the net now, staring at it with the ball in his hands for long enough that you feel the tiny, rough pebble of it as his fingers press until the blood strains them pale, he doesn’t see potential, doesn’t see opportunity. Less than scoring, he doesn’t see a point. For a little while this season it seemed like there were times where he was squinting to try and find it, but then he stopped looking altogether.

Simmons is not an uncurious person on the floor. In his defensive flourishes there are testing bouts of call and response, pouncing jabs that convert to steals where he is off and easily running alone back down the court. Sequences where he slips free from three consecutive screens and sidles his body in front of a pass, or smacks a chasedown block so hard against the glass the ball ricochets back to half-court, swings around James Harden like a squirrel slingshotting its manic body around the trunk of a tree and not a 200-plus-pound man bound to the gravitational drag of gravitational drag. You don’t move that way, try that way, if you aren’t interested in seeing how far you can stretch your own skill, and you don’t do any of that if you aren’t at least a little aware you might fail, wrestling the fear of it down like an everyday demon.

So I don’t think what Simmons is seeing there laying in wait for him around the basket is as simple a ghost as doubt — he’s had enough dunks this season to exorcise anything like that. His hesitation feels like someone getting to the edge of something very high and stopping. His whole body is behind it. It’s not that there’s something there that he’s anxious of, it’s that nothing is. The end of the known world of the basketball court, doodles of sea monsters added later by the gleeful cartographers hearing about it secondhand and with a propensity for flair (us, it’s us).

History has made a wall for Simmons. To demolish it, he’d need the full weight of Daryl Morey, Doc Rivers and Joel Embiid’s belief behind him, except they can’t see it. They see a very talented guy they built a franchise around navigating the floor like he’s in pitch dark for long stretches. And they’re all right, the front office, Embiid and Simmons, because the Sixers have built him a tomb. Philly fans can come, pay their respects, remember the promise of Simmons, commemorate real-time and jump forward to the comfort of a history that never was because it’s still, forever, forming. The thing about the Process is that however honest its intention, it’s become a catch-all, a stop gap, a stalling tactic, season upon season of walking in circles. Purgatory, rebranded.

If Simmons stays with the Sixers he will be buried alive by history, his own and the team’s, sealed into some labyrinthian scheme even Sam Hinke, the architect of that whole mausoleum, didn’t know the half of.

It almost doesn’t matter where he goes, so long as he does. Assuming it’s a system that can fit him with a better, straightforward way of seeing the floor, then Simmons stops being the league’s curio. Put him at the five, take him off point, let him live for a time at the wings to slyly bully and disrupt. And the Sixers will be better without him if only because they will be handed the rare gift of going back and reinventing history as they always should have: picking Embiid or Simmons, but not both. There’s only the one option now, but the Sixers saw, in brief stretches, how easy it can be to ride a history not unnecessarily forked every time it gains momentum. To quit making ghosts out of chances, pick a direction, and play it in real time.