On today's episode of The Sixers Beat, Rich and I talk about Ben Simmons, who has a nerve

impingement in his lower back. He will be re-evaluated in two weeks, but likely out, longer than

that. What will that mean in terms of who will start? How will that threaten the Sixers

season? We talk about it all, while then also

touching about the recent play of Joelle and Bede. With that out of the way, on the show.

All right. Welcome welcome everybody.

This is Derek Podner.

Joined by Rich Hoffman on the Sixers Beat, part of the Athletics.

Podcast Network, as always at the top, or at least more frequently at the top than we used to do.

If you're not already subscriber to The Athletic, head on over to Theathletic.com slash Sixers Beat.

You can get 40% off a yearly subscription. I guess just to highlight one article, Rich recently sat down with Matisse Thibel, and he showed him basically a bunch of highlights of Matisse's defense and some low lights, a mixture of Bose. There's like one or two, yeah. One or two, you sneak it in there. Yeah. and basically had matisse walk through what he was thinking while that was going on and how he reads offenses and

how he jumps plays that most people don't jump and rich took the video to play had uh had

matisse's thoughts play over top of the video as audio and it combined it into a really good post. So go check that out. Just one of the many reasons, most of which come from Rich and Mike, but one of many reasons to subscribe to the athletic. And like I said, you can get 40% off of yearly subscription. So you're talking like a couple bucks a month. It's worth your time. Definitely. And one other thing I'd like to add, Matisse is not playing well right now.

And I think it was even a little bit before I did the post. I did the post overall Star Break.

So that was a good time to get them because the Sixers had a rare practice. Of course, a practice where an injury happened that we're going to talk about.

But he's not playing well right now.

And I know anybody who listens to birds with friends knows about the Kapadia curse.

I do not want to jump in on that.

But I will say that I know that he is not playing that well right now.

I mean, he's still a very important part of this team's future and really one of the, the, yeah, he's not playing well now, but I think for the most part people have been pretty unequivocally happy with his season based off of what they expected and what his role will be in a future. So go check it out. It's a, it was a fun read and I'm sure it was fun for Rich to do as well. Well, it was fun for me to watch. I was sitting there watching them go through the interview, and you'd look over, and at some points,

Matisse would be very serious and look mildly annoyed and or just really in thought. And then other times he was he was laughing and going back and giving the piece of read now. It's fun to try to put together which ones he was laughing at which ones he was a little annoyed at, but go check

it out. All right. So the big news of the last couple of, I guess about a week, I think he,

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