Ben Simmons vows to get past his injury woes and ‘dominate’ for Nets this season as he also opens up on his relationship with head coach Jacque Vaughn

Ben Simmons has vowed to get past his injury woes and dominate this upcoming season for the Brooklyn Nets, with the point guard opening up about his rehabilitation, status and relationship with head coach Jacque Vaughn ahead of tip-off in October.

The 27-year-old will complete Australia’s World Cup campaign in the Philippines, Japan and Indonesia this summer to focus on his health (both physical and mental) and his goal of playing the most games in the 2023-2024 season. . He also wants to continue working on improving his relationship with Vaughn, which he says started out “terribly.”

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

“It will be great when I come back and dominate people,” said Simmons Andscape – a sports and pop culture website owned and operated by ESPN and formerly known as The undefeated. “I don’t intend to return as the same player as last season because that’s not even close to where I am now.

“I get excited because I say, ‘Damn, I would (expletive) be the player I was last year.’ But I know where I was last year, so that’s easy to say. But it’s just fun to go and do what you live when you’re there.”

Simmons was involved in only 42 of 82 regular season games with the Nets last season, starting 33 of them. He barely played with Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, both of whom were traded in February, since they came to Brooklyn from Philadelphia exactly one year earlier for James Harden.

Simmons said he was on the verge of returning after a lengthy injury layoff that sidelined him for most of the 2021–22 season before the start of the playoffs, but aggravated his back, leading to an operation on a hernia in May 2022.

“Rehab was a little bit different because it wasn’t with people I’ve been with before, so it felt a little bit new,” Simmons said, referring to the Nets’ medical staff.

“It was just one of those things where they didn’t really know my body, so they didn’t know what I really needed at the time.”

The three-time All-Star certainly makes a point considering he played through pain last season, as a full recovery from microdiscectomy surgery for an L-4 disc herniation ranges from two weeks to 18 months or more, according to Spine-Health.com.

Simmons, 27, suffered from long-term back pain during both the 2021-2022 and 2023-24 seasons

And looking back at his injury hell, Simmons acknowledges it was unwise for him to return to the court for the Nets last season.

“Yeah sure,” he said of whether he thought his hasty comeback was a mistake. “I was definitely on the floor, when I shouldn’t have been on the floor at the beginning of the season.

“But I also don’t think I was in the right place not to play. That also played a part in it, but at the end of the day, my body is my career, so I need it to be healthy. So I made decisions based on just trying to please the people. Personally, I don’t think that was right for me.’

Simmons said that hiring Bernie Lee as his new agent helped him get over his injury issues and that they played a negative role in his relationship with Vaughn when the latter replaced Steve Nash as the Nets’ head coach in November 2022.

“I feel like our relationship was terrible in the beginning,” said Simmons, who added that he and Vaughn rarely spoke when Vaughn was still Nash’s assistant. ‘I do not play. I don’t really have that kind of relationship with (Vaughn), because he wasn’t the head coach, because sometimes there’s a little distance, or a little gap between assistants and injured players.

And I got mad at him because there was no communication. There isn’t. So (I’m) a little frustrated with Coach. I know Coach is frustrated with me.

Simmons revealed that he and Nets head coach Jacque Vaughn weren’t initially tight last year

“One day people tell him I’m fine, and the next day I’m not. I was not good from the start. So it was a difficult situation for him and me. But now that he has the right plan and team around me, he says, ‘Okay, he’s committed. He wants to work. He wants to win and is willing to do what he has to do to get on the field.”

“So now we’re in a great place. I talk to him every other day.’

According to Vaughn, he went to Miami three times during the summer to watch Simmons train The New York Post and assured the first overall pick of the 2016 draft that he will play point guard this upcoming season.

Simmons, who has played in two-on-two scrimmages over the past two weeks, said he will be ready by the first game of the 2023/24 season against Cleveland in October for the Nets and will be in much better shape than he was a year ago.

‘Certainly. Yes,” Simmons said. “In the version I’m in now, if I played against myself from last season, I’d kill him. That’s how I feel.’

Teammate Cam Johnson previously said Simmons is ready to go and is in a “good place.”