Ben Simmons’ Philadelphia return was the NBA at its soap-operatic finest

It was the type of night that only the NBA in all its soap-operatic, meme-friendly, hyper-petty splendor can deliver. Ben Simmons’ first appearance in Philadelphia since demanding a trade from the 76ers over the summer was always going to be extra in all the messiest ways, but Thursday night’s wildly entertaining homecoming somehow managed to exceed the weeks of mounting hype that preceded it.

And not because the game itself was in any way competitive, for it certainly was not. The sellout crowd of 21,408 rollicking fans who came to release more than nine months of pent-up frustration wound up booing their own team in the fourth quarter as the visiting Brooklyn Nets led by as many as 32 points in a wire-to-wire 129-100 beatdown of the hometown Sixers.

The prevailing tenor of Philadelphia’s most anticipated regular-season game in two decades was more WWE than NBA. Three weeks after landing with Brooklyn in a trade he’d spent months lobbying for, having been branded the primary culprit of a disastrous playoff exit at the hands of the Atlanta Hawks, Simmons returned to South Philly as a larger-than-life heel: the devil wears Louis Vuitton. That he didn’t even dress for Thursday’s game as he continues to recover from a back injury and work back to match fitness after a 54-game holdout was almost immaterial.

Philadelphia is a city where people care a little too much about sports and the mania around Thursday night’s nationally televised matchup did little to dispel that reputation. While Simmons attempted to keep a low profile around town, he was mobbed by angry hordes the few times he surfaced in public in episodes that were quickly disseminated on social media. Both of the city’s two 24-hour sports-talk radio stations took