How Ben Simmons' season of the future makes him Rookie of the Year today

Not only are rookie seasons allegories, they are the auspicious fulfillment of allegories. They will eventually become a part of a time capsule that we’ll use to help remember what yesterday was like as they forge a new future in a league so concerned with the present. So much about today’s NBA is about how long the Warriors can extend their league-wide dominance and what LeBron James’ omnipresent brilliance means among the canon of transcendental luminaries.

What made Ben Simmons the Rookie of the Year over Donovan Mitchell is the sense that what he brings to the league is a metaphorical look into its future, a linear progression in the trend of moving away from epimorphic positionality. No longer are players born into a position, but the ability to slide into the role that best fits the team in any given situation. Ben Simmons, a 6-10 point guard with the finishing ability of a modern power forward and the length to defend anyone in between, gave us a first look at how Philly intends on finding its own seat at the table among the elite.

While Simmons goes back to Philly with the award, Mitchell’s season pushed the boundaries of what a race for such an arbitrary award could look like. Simmons spent a year breaking a priori assumptions about expected skill sets while Mitchell relied on familiar tropes, but that familiarity helped Utah find the kind of energy needed to navigate a brutal Western Conference expected to eat the team alive.

Watching Ben Simmons assiduously pick his spots contrasted against Mitchell’s exhibitionistic performances may have been the most fascinating contrasting of styles for a pair of rookies vying for this award in quite some time. In so many ways, they’re valued equally by their teams — young studs charged with taking a new era of their franchise to heights unimagined until they set foot on the floor.

For Simmons, the story is just as important as the production. These 76ers intentionally produced bad basketball in hopes of landing a point-forward with the ability to augment an offense — even without the ability to shoot from distance. The future of Philly is firmly in the hands of a player without the single most important contemporary skillset, and yet he still played above and beyond nearly all of his peers.

Simmons became the first rookie since Oscar Robertson to average at least 15-8-8, the first since Magic Johnson to exceed these totals before his 22nd birthday and just the seventh player ever — regardless of age — in NBA history. Every player who has reached these numbers in a single season is either in the Hall of Fame now or will be when he retires. Simmons is no doubt a generational player who should be celebrated and honored for an exceptional first year on court.