Ben Simmons is healthy. No, seriously. Put down the phone. Stop laughing. Ben Simmons is healthy. The former No. 1 pick and three-time NBA All-Star is practising without restrictions at an Australian national-team minicamp in Melbourne and preparing for another shot at the NBA. Multiple teams reportedly have interest, and one Western Conference team has apparently put a non-guaranteed offer on the table. Reuters If this sounds familiar, congratulations on having survived the previous six seasons. Simmons comeback stories have become an NBA tradition somewhere between Christmas Day games and everybody pretending the regular-season awards don't matter. This one, though, is different. For starters, Simmons didn't play at all last season. His last NBA appearance came with the Clippers in 2025. Instead of immediately attempting another return, he disappeared from the league, trained in Miami and has spoken about needing time away to find himself again. ESPN.com Now he's 30, apparently healthy and willing to take a minimum contract. That's quite a journey for a player who once looked like he might spend a decade terrorising the Eastern Conference. People forget just how absurd early Ben Simmons was. At 6-foot-10, he could defend almost anybody, rebound like a forward and run an offence like a point guard. He won Rookie of the Year. Made three straight All-Star teams. Made an All-NBA team. Twice made First Team All-Defense. And he did most of it while treating the three-point line like an electric fence. Then came Philadelphia. Game 7 against Atlanta in 2021. Simmons had a path to the basket, Trae Young nearby and an entire city's future mental health hanging in the balance. He passed. The Sixers lost. One basketball decision became the Zapruder film of Philadelphia sports. From there, everything unravelled. The trade demand. The holdout. Brooklyn. Back problems. More back problems. Brief returns. More absences. The Clippers. A player once considered a cornerstone became one of the internet's favourite recurring jokes. Which is why this comeback is interesting. Simmons isn't trying to become that Ben Simmons anymore. He doesn't need 16 points, eight rebounds and eight assists. Nobody is building a franchise around him. Nobody needs him taking jump shots in an empty gym for Instagram. He needs to defend. Pass. Rebound. Stay healthy. And accept that the NBA now sees him as a role player. Ironically, modern basketball might suit that version of Simmons better than the league he entered. Teams love size, switching and secondary playmaking. A healthy 6-foot-10 defender who can handle the ball still has obvious value. The question was never whether Ben Simmons could play basketball. The question became whether his body would let him — and whether everything that happened along the way had made basketball somewhere he still wanted to be. His decision to pay his own way to Melbourne and practise with Australia suggests there's still something there. He's also talking about representing the Boomers at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Reuters Maybe this comeback fails. Maybe his back goes again. Maybe we're reading another "Ben Simmons looks incredible in workouts" story twelve months from now. We've certainly earned the scepticism. But there would be something genuinely fascinating about the alternative. Because Ben Simmons has already been a prodigy, an All-Star, a franchise cornerstone, a trade asset, a disappointment, a patient and a punchline. At 30, he's finally attempting the one role nobody ever imagined for him. Just being a basketball player again.