There's Nothing to Do About Tobias Harris But Wait
Just try to ignore the issues for a while and hope that they kinda magically fix themselves.
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'm not supposed to be this guy when it comes to Tobias Harris. I was the guy who never liked the trade for him -- giving up way too much for a guy who was not and likely was never going to be an All-Star, who didn't fill a major position or role of need for us, and who we were just a half-season away from having to pay way too much and too long to keep (which we did). He spent all last year proving me (mostly) wrong, until he (mostly) didn't. And now that he's maybe even a bigger target for Sixers fan rancor than the guy literally giving up millions to not even play for the team, I find myself the guy who's actually preaching patience with him. In case I haven't mentioned yet this calendar year, this has been a weird Sixers season.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not defending 2022 Tobias, his contract, or the process by which he became part of the Process as Actually Good. His season hasn't quite been as disastrous as you'd believe if you were casually flipping past Sixers Twitter on an average game night, but it's been dramatically below his standards and emphatically not what the team has hoped for or needed from him this season. His slumping has been going on for too long for it now to be written off as a natural low-tide point over a long season, and there aren't particularly obvious signs of it starting to trend back in the right direction -- as evidenced by his back-and-forth with fans at the WFC Monday night, always something of an event horizon point for Philadelphia athletes. We're also past the point of a simple adjustment in approach or positioning or mentality being the catch-all solution: Some of that might help, but not as much as him simply playing better would. Tobias is a problem right now -- not the Real Hooper kind -- and it may still get worse with him before it gets better.
But with all of that said -- he's not the kind of problem we can do much about at the moment. And rather than try to force a solution that isn't there, we might be better off adopting the strategy I took with an ever-growing pile of malfunctioning Discmen in the late '90s and early '00s: Just try to ignore the issues for a while and hope that they kinda magically fix themselves.
Fuck That, Trade Tobias, you say? Sounds great: Who are we trading him to, what are we getting back for him, and which Sixers GM are you hoping to pull the trigger on the deal? I'll save you the trip to the Trade Machine: There are no teams right now desperate enough for a slumping 29-year-old tweener forward in the creamy middle of both a max extension who is not currently adding a ton of value on either side of the court to fire off a January swap for him that gives us anything of particular value -- even cap relief -- in return. The best we could hope for with trading Tobias right now would be to get back worse players that happen to fit a little better and/or to give up additional assets for a closer-to-lateral move (a la Al Horford for Danny Green) -- neither of which is likely to bring meaningful-enough improvement in the short-term to be worth the potential long-term damage of coughing up extra resources just to deal a player at his least valuable.
Even if it was: Do we really expect Daryl to consider it a top priority to be dealing Tobias Harris right now? Lest we forget, he's still got finding a new home for No. 25 to deal with, and while he's still asking for the sun, moon and at least a couple blue-chip constellations for one of his two highest-paid distressed assets, it's pretty hard to imagine him weakening his position taking an obvious bath in a deal for the other. Not to mention that even if we would consider trading Tobias for better-fitting role players, we can't even really know who or what those better-fitting role players would be until we know what the primary trade return for The Other Guy is. There's just no real sense to panic-trading Tobias while that bigger-scale stuff is still lingering.
And if Philly's formerly most eligible bachelor ends up staying in the City of Brotherly Love for the whole season? Well, then it doesn't really matter what we do with Tobias this season, because we're not winning the title this year anyway. Yes, Joel is playing at a godly level right now and it is grand larceny to waste a year of his prime; no, there is no chance of us contending with Seth Curry and second-year Tyrese Maxey as our second- and third-best players no matter how 1984 Prince-dominant our big man is at the moment. Yes, Tobias is tough to watch right now; no, that's not an actual reason for Morey to trade him for one of those late-career-Dwight Howard type returns that leaves you scouring the Woj or Shams tweet hoping to find where the missing good part is.
Bench Tobias, you say? Tempting, given how much more Embiid seems to thrive playing next to shootier fours like Georges Niang or a particularly stretched Isaiah Joe (four threes last night, finally!!) But again: Which coach are we asking to be the one doing the benching? Doc Rivers, vet-loving creature of habit who has no problems making excuses for his big-name players and whose previous two seasons with Tobias also happened to be the most productive of the embattled forward's decade-long career? Even if Harris wasn't paid a basically unbenchable amount of money -- not that I think there should be a correlation, but I'm not the guy who has to answer to the dudes signing the checks -- it'd be wildly unrealistic to consider that a likely course of action for Doc. (And before the lusting for Dan Burke gets totally out of control after two games, I couldn't see a rookie head coach making a midseason move that dramatic either.)
So if we're unlikely to trade him or to bench him -- and hopefully we're not quite at the point of being ghoulish (or short-sighted) enough to root for him to get sick or injured -- I don't think there's much for us to do except to kinda wait it out. And while that's not a particularly satisfying solution, I do think it's one that at least has a decent amount of upside.
I don't know why Tobias has been as bad as he's been this season. His physical indomitability in the post and particularly in transition has vanished, he doesn't seem particularly comfortable shooting from anywhere and his effort on defense and on the boards seems extremely conditional. But I do know he hasn't been this bad all season: He actually started the year off averaging 20 and 9 on 54% shooting and with a near 3-1 AST: TO ratio -- with big performances against the Hawks and Nets -- before having his season interrupted six games in and missing the next half-dozen contests in COVID protocols. Even in the five games after coming back from that, all without Embiid, his stats were again solid: 22-7-4 on 46% shooting (40% from three). It wasn't until he came back from missing two more games with hip soreness that his numbers really started to crater: Down to 17 and 7 on just 41% shooting (25% from three!) in the 15 games since.
Is he still dealing with lower body issues? A long COVID recovery? Seasonal affective disorder? Could not say and would not want to speculate much -- but whatever the answer, it seems improbable that a month into his age-29 season, he suddenly became straight-up washed. And while it provides less comfort with each passing 4-14 shooting performance, it's worth remembering that this time last year, we were debating Tobias Harris' very real All-Star case, during a dream season in which he seemingly put it all together to become a high-level second option and prolific late-game weapon for Philly -- making the fake trades that Sixers fans mocked up in the season's first week shipping him out for the inflatable versions of Blake Griffin or Kevin Love seem particularly silly. He was that guy for nearly the entire regular season, and further into the postseason than you probably remember too (23 and 9 on 54% FG through the first nine games against Washington and Atlanta -- until his 2-11 debacle against the Hawks in Game Five tainted the memory of all that came before it.) Reasonable to say at this point that he's having a bad year; less so to say that at this point he is simply a bad player.
Will even the best-case version of Tobias Harris be the player we really need him to be, particularly at his heavily marked-up price tag? Probably not, but that guy is still fairly valuable, and worth struggling a little through hard times for rather than simply jettisoning for spare parts. You could even see it recently in the game against Washington -- Tobias' best performance of recent weeks -- where for a handful of possessions in the third quarter, he went to work in the mid-post and got buckets while Joel lingered beyond the arc and essentially put up an out-of-office email for a few minutes of game action. For Jo to continue to play at career-peak levels, he's gonna need those stretches every now and again where the offense largely functions without him even with him on the court, when it's run through somebody who doesn't need him to set picks or provide particular spacing or rolling gravity to still be able to get theirs. Tyrese can't do that, Seth certainly can't do that; it's really Tobias or nobody for this bunch.
Maybe Tobias never returns to those levels for more than a game or two at a time again. Even if so, it still makes sense to be patient with trading him: Teams might not want to spring for a mid-level starter being paid superstar money for more than half of a five-year contract, but when it becomes just two remaining years in the offseason, that might not be so unpalatable. Maybe at that point a promising team with mostly young guns decides it's time to get a few established short-term vets in the mix, and doesn't gouge us for the favor of taking Tobias off our hands. And hell, maybe in the meantime, our situation with No. 25 finally is resolved, and suddenly there's more room to move with and around Tobias. The circumstances around him could still improve even if his play doesn't.
I know it's not a lot to hope for, and it's certainly not a lot to go on in the meantime -- but hey, this is why you don't overpay in assets for a sub-All Star player who doesn't totally fit your team's short- or long-term needs, just for the privilege of overpaying for him in money and cap space shortly after: You can get away with it while he's playing at his best, but when his production dips for an extended period of time, you're basically fucked. And while I do think Tobias Harris will play better for this team at some point before the end of this season, I certainly couldn't guarantee it.
All I feel (relatively) safe in guaranteeing is that he's not leaving the team or even the starting five in the meantime. Screen-shot your three-teamers if you want, post your on-off stats to show how much more effective lineups are with Niang at the four, boo that man on the WFC floor to your heart's content -- I don't really see the point of any of it, but do what you gotta do to get through this challenging late-Process season. Just know that this watched pot isn't actually boiling anytime soon, and maybe consider making a snack or something in the meantime. If I can do it, you probably can too.