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The case for Ben Simmons to be included in the NBA All-Star team has gone all the way to the Australian federal parliament.
MP Tim Watts made an impassioned plea on Thursday for the Philadelphia 76ers player to become the first Australian to make the prestigious line-up.
Simmons, from Melbourne, has been continually overlooked for the showpiece game on 18 February, despite delivering an NBA rookie season comparable in terms of numbers to the likes of basketball greats Oscar Robertson and Magic Johnson.
Simmons garnered the third most votes for a guard in an initial Eastern Conference poll, but was not selected with the final say going to coaches and the league’s commissioner, Adam Silver. Since then, injuries to other players have reopened the door to Simmons, but each time more seasoned replacements have been called up instead.
But Simmons, 21, now has another chance after New York Knicks player Kristaps Porzingis sustained a cruciate ligament tear and Watts, who represents the constituency of Gellibrand in Melbourne’s west, was keen to present his case in parliament in Canberra.
“I rise today to express my outrage at the exclusion of Australian Ben Simmons from the NBA All-Star game,” said Watts. “In a record-breaking rookie year for the Philadelphia 76ers, Ben is currently averaging nearly 17 points, eight rebounds, seven assists in a game.
“He’s already had five triple-doubles, and frankly no one with two brain cells to rub together would want Goran Dragic [Kevin Love’s replacement] on their team over Ben.”
Watts, a keen basketball fan who plays in a Simmons jersey in a regular game with other MPs at Parliament House in Canberra, was at a loss to explain Simmons’s omission but, with fellow Australian Joe Ingles also overlooked for the three-point contest on All-Star weekend, he theorised there was an international plot at play.
“The fact that compatriot ‘jingling’ Joe Ingles has also been left out of the three-point competition, despite currently sitting third in the league in three-point percentage, makes me think there’s some kind of anti-Australian conspiracy going on at the league head office at the moment,” he said.
“If you thought that Australia was angry about the ‘Simpsons vs Australia’ TV episode, you ain’t seen nothing yet, Yanks.”
Watts was referring to “Bart vs Australia” an episode of The Simpsons, first aired in 1995 and in which Bart is indicted for fraud in Australia. Producers of the show received complaints from Australians who believed the episode mocked their country.
Watts told Guardian Australia the response in the US has already been enormous and he was hopeful his statement would have the desired effect.
“The speech has been shared thousands of times,” he said. “It was on ESPN and all of the specialist news publications there. So hopefully the NBA commissioner gets the message ... to right this wrong and put Ben in the team.
“More broadly though I’d love it if Australians in the general public realised the golden generation we have playing in the NBA at the moment. We had nine Australians playing in the NBA this year and they really look like modern Australia – Indigenous Australians, children of immigrants, refugees. They’re doing us proud on thew international stage and I thought I might be able to lay a broader message about how well these guys are going.”
Another politician with a penchant for basketball was quick to show her support for Watts’s speech, with the Labour senator and former chief executive of Basketball Australia, Kristina Keneally, turning to social media.
Earlier in the week, Simmons’s 76ers team-mate Joel Embiid said he hoped the NBA “don’t do the same bullshit” and overlook him again given another chance to select him.
Rookies are rarely selected for the All-Star Games, with a general understanding that players need to prove themselves over a longer period of time before being bestowed with such an honour. Should Simmons be successful in his bid, he will become the first rookie to play in an All-Star game since Blake Griffin in 2011.
(GUARDIAN)
