Ben Simmons signed a one-year, $3.5 million deal with the Sacramento Kings on Friday, and I want to believe this is different. A guy looking fantastic in a gym workout is the same story that’s opened every Simmons comeback since 2022.
Shams Charania and Marc Spears broke the deal for ESPN.
Simmons is 30 now, entering his tenth NBA season, after spending the entirety of 2025-26 rehabbing a back and legs that have betrayed him on a predictable schedule. His last NBA game was April 29, 2025, in a first-round exit with the Clippers.
https://x.com/ShamsCharania/status/2095867897146937644
The contract is where this actually gets interesting.
Simmons’ salary is $3,524,115, but the way minimum deals hit the cap for a player with his service time, Sacramento’s real number is closer to $2.45 million. Whatever he gives them costs next to nothing, and that’s the entire argument for doing this in the first place.
I’ve watched this exact arc four times already. Philadelphia shipped him to Brooklyn in February 2022, and the Nets discovered a herniated disc before he’d played a single minute for them. He made it through 42 games the next season before back inflammation and a calf strain shut him down in mid-February. The year after that cost him a pinched nerve, back surgery, and most of the schedule.
Last season, finally healthy enough to play, he logged about 8.4 minutes a night off the Clippers bench in his first playoff run since 2021. Denver ended that in the first round anyway.
None of this happened because Ben Simmons can’t play basketball.
He’s a three-time All-Star and the 2018 Rookie of the Year, a guy who at his best could guard three positions and push a break better than most point guards half his size. That version of him is why Kings GM Scott Perry made the trip to a Miami workout in late August, where one person in the gym came away calling him fantastic, and why Sacramento followed up with a medical evaluation and a sit-down with head coach Doug Christie instead of just moving on.
Somebody has to replace the minutes after cutting DeMar DeRozan loose this summer, and Simmons slots in as insurance behind rookie point guard Darius Acuff Jr., not as the plan. Minnesota and Golden State both circled and walked away without making an offer.
The Kings didn’t win a bidding war here. They were the only ones bidding.
There’s one honest complication worth sitting with: zero-downside deals are also how real redemption stories start when the redemption turns out to be real, and after his minicamp redemption tour with the Boomers this summer, at least one franchise is willing to find out.
Three teams already believed the workout tape before Sacramento. Check back in December.
