Australian returns on AU$4.9m contract after season on sidelinesFormer No 1 pick hopes to reignite basketball career with fourth clubAustralian former No 1 overall draft pick Ben Simmons has taken a significant step towards resurrecting his NBA career, agreeing a one-year deal with the Sacramento Kings.The Melbourne-born guard returns on a US$3.5m (AU$4.9m) contract after sitting out the entire 2025-26 campaign while rehabilitating back and leg injuries that have hampered him in recent years. C
Australian returns on AU$4.9m contract after season on sidelines
Former No 1 pick hopes to reignite basketball career with fourth club
Australian former No 1 overall draft pick Ben Simmons has taken a significant step towards resurrecting his NBA career, agreeing a one-year deal with the Sacramento Kings.
The Melbourne-born guard returns on a US$3.5m (AU$4.9m) contract after sitting out the entire 2025-26 campaign while rehabilitating back and leg injuries that have hampered him in recent years.
Recruiting ex-pros. Inflaming Ukraine-Russia tensions. Suing the SEC and being sued back. The school is adapting to a new reality – and also creating a new oneIn 1893, a chemistry professor named Charles Coates arrived at Louisiana State University and wrote that, to his surprise, “there was practically no athletics in the student body: no football, no tennis, and only very little baseball in the spring.” A broad program of sports struck him as the kind of thing a school should have, particularl
Recruiting ex-pros. Inflaming Ukraine-Russia tensions. Suing the SEC and being sued back. The school is adapting to a new reality – and also creating a new one
In 1893, a chemistry professor named Charles Coates arrived at Louisiana State University and wrote that, to his surprise, “there was practically no athletics in the student body: no football, no tennis, and only very little baseball in the spring.” A broad program of sports struck him as the kind of thing a school should have, particularly as US universities were beginning to tout intercollegiate athletics as critical to a balanced higher-ed experience and another way to justify the cost of entry. But 133 years on, sports aren’t merely the main attraction at LSU. They’re the school’s raison d’être, the blinkered obsession that consumes the university and its most prominent ambassadors.
Any doubt that the business of educating college students is just a nettlesome distraction from the business of college sports in Baton Rouge has been emphatically dispelled over the past 10 months. On the football side, the school has spent or committed roughly $162m to its last three head coaches: Ed Orgeron, the folksy national champion in 2019 who received a $17m buyout when he was fired two years later; Brian Kelly, the unloved underachiever who received a $54m buyout after being fired last October; and Lane Kiffin, the Kelly replacement whom it signed to a $91m deal a month later. Clemson, the opponent for LSU’s season opener at home on Saturday, are about to find out what all that money buys.
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