The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
Process pressure shouldn’t hold Harris back
CAMDEN, N.J. » The plan was argued and supported, ridiculed and rejected, discussed and analyzed, tried and, finally, completed. And in the end, it had all led to Tobias Harris.
The 76ers’ Process, while controversial, was never so complex that it required a Stanford MBA. It was meant to lose games, acquire high draft choices, conserve money and assets and, when it was ready to deliver greatness, inspire high-priced stars to join the act. That’s all it was. Lose. Draft Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons. Start to win. Become appealing. Find a great player willing to sign a nine-figure contract to provide the finishing touches.
The true believers were convinced that player would be LeBron James, the most talented basketball player ever. But no game plan works to precision. So it would be Harris. It would be a ninthyear combo forward with no All-Star Games but with enough appealing talents to be worth a fiveyear, $180,000,000 offer to become the final piece.
He’s not James. But is he good enough? That will be the theme of the seventh season of what Brett Brown has called his “interesting life.” Embiid and Simmons are home-grown, star-quality differencemakers. Josh Richardson is an above-average perimeter player, the kind every NBA team has somewhere in its starting lineup. Al Horford is an intriguing veteran on a robust fouryear deal heavily spiced with incentives to win a championship.
But Harris is that in-hisprime, versatile, improving, fan friendly, media savvy developing All-Star with the potential, at least, to complete the project. Go? “I think that Tobias Harris for an entire season is, for me, a priceless gift,” Brown said. “Because there is nothing like a peer talking to a peer, a teammate talking to a teammate. It expedites growth. It validates doing the right thing.”
More than once, the Sixers spent as if Harris was priceless. At the last trade deadline, they flipped two first-round picks and potential star Landry Shamet into a complicated deal with the Clippers for Mike Scott, Boban Marjanovic and Harris, then 26 and on an expiring contract. The idea was to help win a championship last season. But it was also to find out about Harris, and vice-versa.
When the season ended and it became clear that Jimmy Butler no longer had time for the Sixers as they were designed, it opened Harris not only to riches but to a higher spot on the organization’s value chart. The Sixers had to rerecruit him, and they did. Their offer was huge. But they also assured him Harris he would play almost exclusively at a three-spot, unlike late last year when he was also required to play some power forward.
With the attention that Embiid is bound to demand inside, with the way Simmons can create, and with everything else the Sixers have assembled around him, that means Harris will have consistent opportunities to score. It also means that he must.
“When you look at the dynamic of our group, with our size, with our ability we have to create different mismatches,” Harris said. “When I signed, I was speaking with Coach and seeing where he wanted to place me, and that they would put me in some more bigger roles than I am used to. But also, I think one of the keys for us this year is to be able to play off one another and the ball movement.
“Obviously, there will be high doses of three-pointers in transition, especially with the team we have defensively.”
Harris should thrive in the newer Sixers’ system, which is based on length and rebounding followed by ball movement more like the 2017-2018 operation. A good shooter, he shot 41.4 percent from the arc as recently as 2017. In the first half of last season with the Clippers, he was so difficult to defend that it was something of a league-wide shock when he was not selected as an All-Star. But after joining the Sixers not long after the arrival of Butler, he was caught in a situation where star-level players were over-compensating to find each other good shots. The result was that, at some points in the postseason, not one of them looked as comfortable as necessary.
“I mean, if you looked at our group last year, we came together, but not really as a group, not really understanding how each other plays,” Harris said. “That was a thing we wanted to improve in the last three weeks, to understand each other’s similarities and how we play and how we operate with a basketball in different ways. So that’s been extremely positive. We have a good feel for our potential.”
After averaging 18.2 points for the Sixers in the regular season, Harris dipped to 15.5 in the playoffs. His defense, too, so sagged in the postseason that he made a promise to the Sixers, and to himself, to improve his lateral movement.
“I want to be a better two-way player for me and the team and the group,” he said. “I spent a lot of time on that.”
He is at the right age, the right stage in his professional development, and in the right system to become an All-Star. If so, he will be the ideal complement to Embiid and Simmons and a dangerous, every-night scorer for a true contending team.
Seven years later, that’s where it all led. To contact Jack McCaffery, email him at jmccaffery@21stcenturymedia.com; follow him on Twitter @ JackMcCaffery