Were We Too Quick to Judge Al Horford This Season?

Was Al just laying low until the playoffs? Time to appreciate?

[photo: Mitchell Leff/Getty Images]

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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Sixers Record: 48-28, 4th in East

You’d hesitate to refer to any Sixers road win this season as “easy,” but that W in Washington last night was… straightforward? No team with Bradley Beal is ever gonna not at least give the Sixers something to think about, but even with his ink-it-in 35, the Wizards got down by double digits in the second quarter and mostly stayed that way throughout. Embiid had a casual 28 and 14, Furkan had his best showing since The Maybe Furkan Game with 20 on 7-9 shooting, and Tobias chipped in a professional 19 and ten, albeit with a 1-7 line from deep, where he continues to struggle. Only two non-Beal Wizards scored in double figures, and the Sixers took this one handily by a final of 125-109, their first win in DC since 2013 (should be a comical exaggeration but somehow totally isn’t!)

And the team’s all-around best performer of the night -- at least by Brett Brown’s locker-room bell-ringing standards? Al Horford, who posted a tidy 22 on 9-13 shooting (including 3-5 from deep), to go with 12 boards, six assists, three blocks, and zero turnovers. I counted one or two times where he got burned on switches after getting caught in no man’s land, but there were also a couple of positions where he was dancing with Beal on the perimeter and was able to keep up with Beal’s one-two stepping pretty admirably. And most importantly, a possible first: I’m not sure that I saw a single clap from Horford throughout the game. Bunnies went down. Rebounds were secured. Points were made. 

In fact, it might be time to adapt our best Killakow-as-Bill Simmons voice and ask that question that we’ve been privately murmuring amongst ourselves for at least the best two weeks, scared to pose publicly: Are we sure that Al Horford isn’t good? 

Yes, we were all ready to write that contract off as a bust by January, and by February, we were wondering if he even could be considered overqualified as a backup center. He scored in single digits in five straight games, including a bagel in 30 minutes against the Bulls before the All-Star break, after which he was yanked from the starting five. His shooting, defense, and even his handsomeness were all at career worsts, and he was getting booed by anyone who wasn’t an immediate blood relation. We were having existential crises over how many picks and other assets we would attach to unload his contract in the offseason before we officially became the Knicks. Mike Meech may still never recover. 

But in March, things started to turn around. Actually, it was the end of February where he had his first good game since Fall Out Boy were a rock band, a 15-7-9 on good shooting in a win over the Knicks. But in March, he discovered something close to consistency; still with the odd clunker here and there (helloooooo Phoenix) but with those duds actually standing out as clear anomalies. In that 16-game period starting with the New York win -- where the team has really needed somebody to lean on with Ben Simmons out -- here are Horford’s averages: 16.5 PPG, 10.1 RPG, 4.5 APG, 1.5 BPG, 51% FG, 39% 3PT, 1.2 TOV. Meanwhile, the Sixers have gone 11-5 over that span. Not exactly MVP numbers, but certainly scraping the upside of what we hoped for when we brought him here, no? 

The biggest things, of course, were the shot and the defense. I can’t tell you how maddening it was to watch Horf go 1-6 from three seemingly every night this winter, mostly on spoonfed looks where he had 26 “I know”s’ worth of time to unload. Well, maybe I can: I certainly tried to at the time, and you were there watching it too, presumably. But now, he’s getting near that critical Hollis Thompson 2 out of 5 conversion rate -- which, by the way, he did basically average for his entire time in Boston, so it’s not like this should be laughably unsustainable -- and dragging his average up to a respectable-enough 35.5% for the season, while opening spacing up for folks like Shake and Tobias to go to work one-on-one a little easier. 

And the defense? I mean, hopes before the season that he’d be one of four Sixers earning all-D honors this summer are still a little far-fetched -- he’s lost a step for sure, and that’s not coming back. But the rest of the team doesn’t have to spend entire possessions scraping the char off of him anymore: He’s active on switches, he’s learning to position himself better, and he even looks a little bit springier on the boards, particularly with his previously leaden second jump. I think I even saw him dive for a loose ball against the Rockets, though that might’ve been a giddiness-induced hallucination after Embiid swatted Russell Westbrook’s floater to damn near half-court. 

A report out of New York says that Leon Rose is interested in hiring Elton Brand as the Knicks general manager, we discuss that, why the Sixers owners are not good sports owners, who we'd opt to trade between Milton and Thybulle if we had to trade one with Horford, we get to the Elite Eight in the Field Of 64 Jigsaws, and the 50% basketball mailbag brings Dario home, figures out who to amnesty, wonders if mead is vegan, and wonders if Spike or Mike would win a one-mile race.

Speaking of Embiid, btw: The most heartening thing of all with this stretch is that it pretty well puts to bed the notion that Horford and Embiid simply CAN’T play together: nope, not possible, don’t even ask. Some particularly perimeter-oriented matchups still give ‘em a little bit of trouble, and their two-man high-low act is still prone to the occasional turnover, but generally they’re fitting together like hand-in-oven mitt this past month. Which isn’t to say that fit concerns with this team were all a media invention: It’s just to say that while Horf may always have trouble playing alongside both Embiid and Simmons, he can still thrive next to one of them at a time -- as long as he’s, y’know, not playing like total shit otherwise. 

Frankly, that’s a big deal. The prognosis on Simmons is looking encouraging, if not exactly high definition, and if he does make it back for the playoffs, that probably means it’s back out of the starting five for Horford. But if he can play effectively in stretches alongside Embiid in the minutes when Simmons sits -- and after spending two months on his couch, we can’t (or at least shouldn’t) keep on using Ben in the postseason until we use him up -- then that means we can still probably rely on him for 20-25 solid minutes a night, without just asking him to pick up whatever scraps Joel leaves him as the backup C. And moving forward, it might mean that he can even find a role on this team of some degree of importance; he’ll never live up to that contract, but it doesn’t have to be the thing that submarines this team outright just in trying to move it. 

“If you think I’m not loving it, you’re wrong,” a giddy Brett Brown told the media after the game when asked about Horf’s recent resurgence, the top two buttons on his shirt fully open. “I mean, we all heard the boos, the dirt that was being poured on Al in the media, particularly after he agreed to move to the bench. And he’s a proud guy, a veteran player, a winning player. We didn’t bring him to Philly for that. But the guys on our staff, and the guys in that locker room, we never stopped believing in what Al could offer this team. And I think we’ve seen that this past month. And I think a lot of folks are going to have to eat their words.” 

Maybe. I’m not exactly printing out my old INPWCATSR columns and lathering ‘em in BBQ sauce just yet -- it’s still just a month, and lest we forget, he actually played like this to start the season, too. We’ll see what happens if and when Ben Simmons gets back, and if and when the Sixers get deep into their playoff run. But with the Sixers coming one win closer to home-court advantage in the playoffs, and Horf finally starting to look like a (former) All-Star again, there’s more reason for hope with this team than there’s been in months. It might just end up being a lovely day with this team after all.