Ben Simmons didn’t make the NBA All-Star team after Goran Dragic was chosen as a replacement for the injured Kevin Love, and one politician in Australia was not impressed.
Watch this Australian politician get emotional about Ben Simmons’ NBA All-Star snub in parliament
Whoa ...
James Dator has been covering a wide range of sports for SB Nation for over a decade, with a special focus on the NFL.
Tim Watts, Federal Labor Member for Gellibrand in Victoria, didn’t hold back — even going so far as to suggest (jokingly) there was a conspiracy against Australian players.
“I rise today to express my outrage at the exclusion of Australian Ben Simmons from this year’s NBA All-Star Game. In a record-breaking rookie year for the Philadelphia 76ers, Ben is currently averaging nearly 17 points, eight rebounds, seven assists in a game. He’s already had five triple-doubles, and frankly nobody with two brain cells to rub together would want Goran Dragic on their team over Ben. The fact that compatriot “Jingling” Joe Ingles has also been left out of the three-point competition, despite currently sitting at third in the league in three-point percentage, makes me think there’s some kind of anti-Australian conspiracy going on in the league head office at the moment.”
Watts is personally invested in this. His seat in Gellibrand (representing the Southwest of Melbourne) isn’t far from where Simmons was born. Furthermore, the politician used this as a segue to mention fellow Australians in the NBA Patty Mills (an indigenous Australian), as well as Thon Maker and Mangok Mathiang, both of whom arrived in Australia as refugees, as a way to explain how Aussies in the league are a microcosm of the nation’s multiculturalism as a whole, and how Aussies should celebrate the talents that refugees and minorities bring to the country.
While the headlines around this may be goofy, the message behind it was really great.
