Ben Simmons Tore His Achilles Three Days Before the Kings Opener. The Comeback Is Over.
Ben Simmons will not play a regular season game for the Sacramento Kings this year, and there is a real chance he has played his last one anywhere.
The Kings announced Sunday that Simmons tore his right Achilles tendon during a live drill at practice. An MRI confirmed it. The team said he will undergo surgery and that “further updates will be provided as appropriate.” ESPN’s Shams Charania reported the injury first. The season-ending prognosis comes from that reporting, not from the franchise, which pointedly attached no timeline of its own.
Sacramento opens Wednesday at the Clippers. Simmons got hurt three days early.
A Comeback That Never Reached Opening Night
This was supposed to be the return. Simmons did not play a single minute in 2025-26. He spent the entire season unsigned and out of the league, dealing with back and leg problems that had already cost him most of three years.
The Kings gave him a look anyway. He agreed to a one-year deal in early September and signed on Sept. 8 for the veteran minimum, $3,524,115, carrying a cap hit of $2,449,421. The money was not guaranteed. Only $1 million would lock in if he made the opening-night roster.
He made it. Then he tore his Achilles. ESPN’s Bobby Marks has said Simmons will collect the full salary anyway, because the injury is severe enough to trigger protection. Sacramento absorbs the cap hit and gets nothing on the floor for it.
The Body Was Always the Question
Simmons went No. 1 overall in 2016 and missed his entire first season with a foot injury. He won Rookie of the Year, made three All-Star teams, earned two All-Defensive First Team selections and finished second in Defensive Player of the Year voting in 2021. Then his back took over the story.
He had a microdiscectomy in May 2022 and a second procedure, a microscopic partial discectomy, in March 2024. Across the last three seasons in which he was actually on a roster, he played 66 games. In the ten years since he was drafted, he has played 383.
Durability was the whole bet Sacramento was making here. The bet lost before tipoff.
Thirty Is a Hard Age for This Injury
Kevin Durant is the obvious comparison, and it is not a comforting one. Durant tore his Achilles in June 2019, also at 30, and returned about 18 months later to average 28.8 points over his next three seasons. He also has not played more than 55 games in a season since. Klay Thompson needed roughly 14 months. Kobe Bryant was back in eight and was never the same player.
NBA returns from this injury have historically landed somewhere between seven and 18 months. Simmons would be 31 or 32 on the other side of it, with two back surgeries behind him, coming off a year in which no team signed him at all.
What Sacramento Does Now
Doug Christie had been weighing whether to start Simmons or De’Andre Hunter. That question answers itself. The playmaking load falls to Zach LaVine and Malik Monk, with Domantas Sabonis operating as the offensive hub he has always been.
There is no replacement on the roster for what Simmons was supposed to provide, because almost nobody in the league provides it: a 6-foot-10 guard who can defend four positions and run a halfcourt offense. The Kings had already waived three players to finalize the roster, so any help has to come from the buyout market or not at all.
Simmons posted a message after the announcement. “This injury is another chapter in my journey, not the end of my story,” he wrote. “I’ve been knocked down before, and I’ve always found a way to get back up.”
Nobody should doubt that he wants it. Betting on the Achilles is a separate matter.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
