Dan Le Batard defends Ben Simmons, says Philly fans ‘can be very cruel’

Amid all the venom and anger, it turns out there’s one sports media figure able to defend Ben Simmons.

Dan Le Batard, the former ESPN host and Miami Herald columnist turned podcast entrepreneur, went after “cruel” Philadelphia sports fans for relentlessly pounding Simmons over his poor performance against the Atlanta Hawks during the Eastern Conference semifinals.

Le Batard was leapfrogging off comments made by ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith. The former Inquirer columnist said Philadelphians will not forgive Simmons for his poor free throw shooting and refusing to take a single shot in the fourth quarter during the final four games of the series.

“I think he’s right about that. I think it’s an ugly part of that city. Their fandom is cruel. There’s a pride in how mean they can be, and they file it under caring, but it can be very cruel,” Le Batard said on Tuesday’s The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz.

La Batard wasn’t arguing that Simmons somehow played well or didn’t deserve some scorn

But Philadelphia certainly takes its sports seriously, and La Batard expressed sympathy for Simmons for having “a moment of mental and human frailty,” and doing so “in a city that isn’t going to be trusted with that vulnerability.”

“Consider your weakest moments,” Le Batard said. “Whatever you view them, whenever you’ve wept, whenever you’ve doubted, whenever it is you’ve felt self-loathing, whenever it is you couldn’t figure something out. And now put the pressure of a city, the pressure of a locker room, the pressure of a 1-seed on it.”

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Following the Sixers’ Game 7 loss to the Hawks, Hall of Famer and TNT analyst Shaquille O’Neal wasn’t exactly shy about what he thought of Simmons’ performance.

“If he was in my locker room, I’d have knocked his ass out,” O’Neal said on TNT’s postgame show.

During the pregame show for Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals between the Hawks and the Milwaukee Bucks, O’Neal returned to the topic of Simmons, noting his comments drew a loud reaction from fans.

“I’m getting some, not that I care, I’m getting some feedback for being hard on Ben Simmons. But what people need to understand is when you’re a great player, everyone goes through this,” O’Neal said on TNT’s pregame show Wednesday night.

“I won four championships, [was in the league] 19 years. Fifteen years of that was, ‘You’re terrible, you’re doing too much, you’re doing this, you’re doing that, focus on your game,’ ” O’Neal added. “So when you keep losing, losing, losing, you finally get to the point where you have to do a self-evaluation and say, ‘You know what? This is what I need to do.’ ”

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