Tobias Harris Is Different This Season

Finally, AU comes around on Tobias Harris.

[art by Zainab Javed]

Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and is now writing for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard. 

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I might not have been as confident in the Sixers all season as I was in them trouncing the Spurs last night. Part of that was playing a mediocre team at home missing their best player in DeMar DeRozan -- but in past years (and past months, really), that'd be just as likely a recipe for head-wall-banging as it would be for an easy W. But even with Embiid on the shelf, I just knew this team was gonna come in and take care of business like a squad of Randy Bachmans, since even before the All-Star break they've looked more locked in, well-oiled and ideologically coherent than any point since the 2017-'18 squad that rattled off 16 wins in a row and capped it off with a season-ending Markelle Fultz triple-double.

There are lots of reasons for this: Matisse Thybulle serving as a one-man Ocean's 11, Dwight Howard suddenly transforming into the kind of player that can reliably both slam and throw (??) alley-oop passes, Furkan Korkmaz poppin' it like every day is New Year's Eve, and of course Ben Simmons continuing to treat half-court defenses with the smug indignation he normally reserves for underqualified critics. But the biggest reason is Tobias Harris, who is having a year beyond what we ever could have hoped for this season, and potentially changing everything for the team around him in the process.

For most of the first half of the season, I was of course reluctant to change my overall perspective on Tobias. I remembered the 2019 portion of his last season, when he was averaging over 22 a night for 15-game stretches where the Sixers were going 13-2, and we were also having early conversations about him as a potential All-Star. He cooled off, as did the Sixers, and by the end of the regular season, he was once again the player we thought he was at the end of the 2018-'19 campaign -- a fourth option on a great team, but only a third option on a good team, and a second option on a team going nowhere. He couldn't really be relied on to carry the load when his superior teammates were out or off, and he was a questionable fit in the best-case version of a team led by Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons. I feared that once some shots stopped going in and once the Sixers started to lose some coin-toss contests, this'd be the Tobi we were once again left with.

Well, we're 39 games into the season and officially out of Anyone Can Have a Hot Month territory, so now I'm willing to commit to it: This is a different Tobias Harris. The guy I'm watching right now can in fact function as an offensive hub for stretches, can be relied on to show up (on both ends) no matter who else is out there on the court, and can absolutely be one of the three best players on an elite regular-season team. It's a staggering shift for a guy who even at the beginning of this season was being shipped by fans -- with assets! -- in imaginary trades for negative-value players like Kevin Love and Blake Griffin, just to get off his seemingly unmovable, team-crippling contract.

The part where I notice the difference the most this year with Tobi is in transition. He's always been decently effective in the open court, but this year his force is just undeniable -- a combination of better fitness and greater determination all of a sudden making him only slightly less terrifying than the likes of LeBron and Giannis once he gets across half court with the ball. He's tops on the Sixers and ninth in the whole league in transition points per game this year with his 5.1 -- up from just 3.2 last year, barely enough to crack the league's top 50 -- with a higher points-per-transition-possession rate (1.40) than anyone else in the top 20. You can't even really defend him with just one guy in transition anymore: You need multiple guys back to form a wall and force him to give the ball up, otherwise he's moving straight through his man like Patrick Swayze in Ghost and flipping the ball in for two.

Speaking of him giving the ball up, that's been the other biggest difference with Tobias this year. At times in his Sixers tenure he's been something of a black hole on offense, a guy who could occasionally bail you out of bad possessions but rarely help you build good ones. But this year, he's actually moving the ball really well -- whether that means giving the ball up in transition, or operating with Jo or Ben in the pick-and-roll, or just whizzing the ball around the perimeter on a kick-out. He's up to a career-high 3.5 assists per game on the season, and that number belies how good he's been lately: nine games of five or more assists in his past 15 contests, which is as many as he had across his last 39 outings before that.

And none of this is even what he's actually become the most improved at this season, which is iso scoring. He's averaging an absolutely absurd 1.38 points per possession in isolation this year -- in the 98.8th percentile for the whole league, which as Sixers Twitter luminary @TrillBroDude points out is just a tiny bit up from the 41st percentile he was in last year. That's not on all that many possessions tracked, exactly -- NBA.com says he averages just 1.2 isolation possessions a game, which feels low -- but his general one-on-one proficiency explains why as soon as he got switched onto Alex Caruso at the elbow late in the fourth quarter against the Lakers, you had to feel pretty confident about his chances to undo the damage of the Sixers' ugliest collapse of the season with one shot.

Ironically, the one thing we most wanted Tobias to do this year -- to up his volume and decisiveness from beyond the arc and free up spacing for Ben and Jo -- is the only thing he really hasn't improved at this season. In fact, he's going the other direction with it: He's down from nearly five threes attempted a game in December to just under four a game in January to 3.3 a game in February and just two a game so far in March. You could certainly see it becoming something of a sticking point as the season progresses, but he's become such an efficient scoring force within the arc that it hasn't affected the team a ton yet -- especially while Korkmaz, Green and even Thybulle lately have been shooting the lights out in support -- and he's had to be more of a centrifugal scoring force with Simmons and/or Embiid out, which opens up three-point shooting for the rest of the team anyway.

Now, if you've gotten this far in this article and you know of my history of Tobias takery, you might be wondering at this point: If I'm acknowledging that I was wrong about Tobias this season, does that mean I'm also ready to acknowledge I've been wrong all along in my constant railing against the Tobias extension and the trade that that brought him here in the first place? (Particularly as my beloved Landry Shamet, already onto his third team, has only just started to jog to life in Brooklyn, and is still struggling to keep his FG% above 40?)

Eh -- almost, but not quite. Certainly this regular-season version of Tobias is close to worth the 36 million a year we're paying him on average, at least contextually if not necessarily objectively. But we still need to see what we actually get from him in the playoffs, where he's been a fairly brutal disappointment so far in his Sixers tenure. Against the best teams in the highest-leverage games, will he still be able to feast in transition? If not, can he get his efficient 20-plus primarily in isolation and in the post? And if not that, will he be able to adapt his game to be more of a secondary playmaker and a legitimate threat as a floor-stretcher? (And will his defense, excellent in a team setting all year, be able to hold up in a potential Brooklyn series where he may have to deal with the likes of Kyrie Irving and James Harden on repeat switches?) I've said all season that he needs to do it all season and in the playoffs to prove his mettle as a Maxed Sixer; I'm willing to concede the first one a little more than halfway through, but we won't know about the second until we actually get there.

Nonetheless, being able to rely on this version of Tobias Harris for the remainder of the regular season changes just about everything of what this team might be capable of: With an improved Embiid, a more aggressive Simmons and a supporting cast really starting to hum in unison, having another guy who can pour in an easy 20-plus a night, play in the flow of the offense, and the also take over the game for stretches when Doc decides to call his number on six straight possessions. As Joel misses at least the next 2-3 weeks, it might be the difference between us staying in the hunt for the top spot in the East and having to settle for our third three-seed in four years -- or the difference between us needing to take a big, potentially risky swing at the deadline and us being comfortable more or less rolling with the roster we have. And if he shows up like this in the playoffs, it could be the difference between us being one player away from true title contention and us actually having a pretty good chance of winning the whole damn thing.