Sixers: Tobias Harris is making a first-time All-Star push

The Sixers are off to a strong start with the best record in the Eastern Conference and they have a signature win over the Los Angeles Lakers, capped off with a buzzer-beater by Tobias Harris to seal the deal.

After a hellish 2019-20 NBA season where the Philadelphia 76ers finished sixth in the conference and were bombed out of the playoffs in four games by the Boston Celtics, this has been a refreshing first quarter of the season. Tobias Harris himself has been emblematic of this dramatic turnaround, and he’s making a legitimate push for a first-time All-Star spot.

Tobias Harris is making an All-Star run for the Sixers

Harris’s outstanding play this season has a direct corollary to the offseason changes the Philadelphia 76ers underwent. The Sixers fired head coach Brett Brown and replaced him with his own former LA Clippers coach, Doc Rivers, and they hired Daryl Morey to run the front office.

Morey promptly traded Al Horford to the OKC Thunder and Josh Richardson to the Dallas Mavericks, getting Seth Curry and Danny Green back in the process. Horford is a fine player, but he possessed redundant qualities that overlapped with Harris, Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons, and his strengths weren’t able to overcome the deficits.

These moves gave Harris more room to operate and reuniting him with Rivers seems like the perfect move to make. In fact, over the 103 games that Harris has now played for Rivers between their time together with the Clippers and the Sixers, he’s shooting 43.1 percent from 3-point range.

A season ago the argument was whether Al Horford or Tobias Harris had the worst contract in the league. This season the debate is whether Tobias Harris is on the inside track for his first-ever All-Star berth.

My argument is that indeed he is. Let’s go to the numbers.

He’s averaging a career-high 20.1 points per game, and his 2-point percentage of 55.4 and 3-point percentage of 46.1 are career-highs by a wide margin. His effective field goal percentage is the best he’s recorded at 59.7, and his true shooting percentage is (you guessed it) a career-high 61.9. While his efficiency has skyrocketed, his usage has ticked down only slightly from last season’s 23.9 percent to 23.3 this season.

So Tobias Harris is shooting the lights out and doing so while scarcely touching the ball less than he did this season. He’s also running the pick and roll drastically more this season than he did last, with 23.2 percent of his possessions coming in that direction, compared to just 17.5 last season.

That was a major hallmark of how Rivers used him in LA as well, and he’s flourished in Philadelphia, scoring 1.058 points per possession (PPP) which places him in the  83rd percentile. It makes sense that the Sixers could pound teams over and over with the pick and roll considering how devastating Joel Embiid is as a roll man.

Harris’s success in the pick and roll has enabled Rivers to use Ben Simmons less as a PnR ball-handler, which is a good thing. So far this season Simmons is scoring just .608 PPP, good for the 12th percentile. That won’t cut it.

With Simmons being an offensive disappointment this season, Harris has been able to step up and provide on that end. He’s been a difference-maker for the best team in the Eastern Conference, and if the Sixers are going to send two players to the All-Star Game (or whatever form the All-Star teams take this season), that duo needs to be Tobias Harris and Joel Embiid.