Tobias Harris drops 33 points in Sixers victory over Raptors

Tobias Harris, Tyrese Maxey, and Joel Embiid all scored 30+ points in a 121-111 win over the Raptors, becoming just the second trio in Philadelphia franchise history to manage that feat.

Here’s what I saw.

The Good

— Tobias Harris’ first quarter is exactly what people have been asking for out of him. No, it’s not because he shot 100 percent from the field (although that certainly didn’t hurt). The difference was in taking shots at all, seizing on open-shot opportunities instead of hoping someone else would drag the offense forward without his help.

Harris’ second made three of the night came on a late-clock attempt that he didn’t have time to think about, with Danuel House Jr. throwing him a hot potato after struggling to get his own shot up from the corner. And that moment highlighted what has been obvious all along — when Harris just acts instead of thinking and then deciding what to do, he’s a much more dangerous basketball player. Hell, we even got a stepback three out of him in the first half, a rare sight in a hot stretch let alone in the funk he has been in.

But it wasn’t just the three-point shot that Harris had going in the first half. Once he got that first catch-and-shoot three to go down, the floodgates opened for him. Harris was a dangerous weapon in transition, and not just as a scorer, with the veteran forward setting up teammates when the Raptors tried to key on him during fast breaks. He also had some big-boy moves in the mid-post, bullying OG Anunoby for some tough buckets in and around the paint.

(One of my favorite Harris plays of the night: Harris sealed off Anunoby around eight feet from the basket, and Joel Embiid completed a hi-lo pass to his forward before Harris was wrapped up for two free throws. We haven’t seen Harris throw his weight around much in recent weeks, and watching him push Anounoby out of his way was a beautiful sight.)

While Harris’ second half was not quite as loud as the first, even the process behind his missed shots was on point. I’m not expecting him to suddenly become an eight-threes per game guy, but the closer he creeps to that sort of number, the harder it’s going to be for teams to sell out against Maxey and Embiid in the middle of the floor. He was a perfect release valve all night long, keeping the defense honest with the outside shot and then bursting through traffic once he’d sucked the defenders out to him.

Let’s make this clear again: Harris’ problems are not related to the skills he has at his disposal. When he plays confident, aggressive basketball, good things tend to happen. This was easily his best game of the season, and it’s a performance he should rewatch and take notes from because he’s capable of more frequent games like these.

— This was, for three quarters, an understated game for Tyrese Maxey. No. 0 spent a lot of the game setting up others and trying to get a feel of when and where to attack. He also had to wait for Toronto’s defense to provide him with opportunities to score, with the Raptors loading up on the Maxey/Embiid pick-and-roll as they dared other guys to beat them.

But Maxey’s fairly quiet performance turned into a dominant, tone-setting avalanche when he took the reins to open the fourth quarter, delivering the killing blow as he has on so many evenings already this season.

While Maxey is always the captain of those Embiid-less minutes early in the second and fourth quarters, it was clear he was going to have to carry them with absences up and down the rotation. And he hit the Raptors with a flurry of the familiar moves we’ve come to love from him: a slick move to get to the basket for a layup, a runner as he approached the paint, and back-to-back threes that nearly caused the roof of the Wells Fargo Center to cave in. Embiid is the guy who gets the MVP chants, but it’s often Maxey who draws the biggest roars from the home crowd, with those patented sidestep threes drawing cheers that threaten to shatter the glass of the backboard.

Maxey’s rookie season, one that featured an inconsistent role and low three-point volume, feels like ancient history. He has far better control of the offense than he has any right to, and a team full of vets shares reverence for his decisions. The guys around him trust that whether he calls his own number or hits them for an open shot, he has made the right decision.

(Well, unless you’re asking Embiid, who wants him to shoot the damn ball more.)

He is a genuine delight to watch play, and he’s damn good on top of that. The best combination there is in sports.

— Joel Embiid has had plenty of carry jobs for this team over the last half-decade, so it’s always a trip to see other guys carrying the weight for him. You are not going to see many worse performances for him than what we got in the first half, with the big guy putting in a disastrous shift on both ends of the floor.

Let’s start at the defensive end — though he made a couple of good plays toward the end of the first half, Embiid rarely found himself in the right position as he tried to stay attached to Jakob Poeltl. It’s rare to see Embiid outscored by any center let alone a guy averaging less than 11 points a night, but Poeltl gave Embiid the business in the first 24, hitting some short floaters or uncontested layups with Embiid sliding and flailing in the wrong directions.

It’s fair to point out that Embiid was physically compromised from about the 5:30 mark of the first quarter onward. After an awkward landing on the baseline, Embiid grabbed at his lower leg and limped to the sideline, coming back in after the timeout. He never seemed completely sure of himself after that, with some of his best offensive finishes accompanied by groans and wincing as he walked off the pain of his landing.

But the six-and-a-half minutes that preceded that incident were not really any better — Embiid opened the game with some ghastly turnovers, throwing multiple passes away as he tried to help a reconfigured lineup work. It was somewhat shocking to look up at halftime and see that he had gotten himself to 4/8 from the field, but he offset the efficiency with five giveaways to Toronto, each one seemingly worse than the last.

That said, even with the big guy grimacing and struggling through much of this game, he found his level in the third quarter, turning what had been a poor game into a good statistical night, at the very least.

It started with Embiid putting just a little bit of extra work in on the break — he beat the Raptors down the floor for some quick buckets on fast breaks, including one finish where he drew a foul and scored through contact from Pascal Siakam. He built some momentum from there, and with the Raptors shading toward him less in the middle of the floor, he was able to find some pockets of space to attack, somehow squeaking out another consecutive 30-10 performance even though it looked in doubt for the first 40-ish minutes of the game.

Even a bad game turns into something for this dude, and “something” was 31-10-9 on 11/21 from the field. So it goes.

The Bad

— I’m just going to complain about the role players tonight if you don’t mind.

It appears we may be at the point of the Kelly Oubre arc where he drives you crazy more often than he makes you happy that he’s in the rotation. He’s making fewer disruptive plays on defense, taking more silly shots outside of the flow of the offense, and starting to look a bit like the guy who wore out his welcome in Golden State.

Marcus Morris has exceeded expectations with his recent play, predominantly because he has shot the hell out of the ball. And no one is expecting him to give starter-level value to the Sixers, or any other team in the NBA for that matter. But with the Sixers down multiple players and Morris thrust into the starting lineup, his defensive warts came roaring back to the forefront. Pascal Siakam killed him with a bunch of simple off-ball stuff.

And I know that Nick Nurse was left with a lot of subpar options on Friday night, missing several key members of the rotation due to injury. De’Anthony Melton and Patrick Beverley being out at the same time leaves them with one guard who can actually dribble, and those two are 0.5 ballhandlers in the first place.

But there had to be a better option than Furkan Korkmaz and Danuel House Jr. for a backcourt when Maxey sat, right? Surely, that’s not the best the Sixers could do.

While Point Furkan was a thing that worked (briefly) once upon a time, I can’t remember the last time he checked in outside of garbage time and gave them solid ballhandling minutes. It’s not Korkmaz’s fault that his best role is as a movement shooter or pure catch-and-shoot guy, but it was ugly watching him try to run point. I thought House gave them some decent minutes in stretches, but his end of the third quarter run next to Korkmaz was as ugly as it gets, with House seemingly unable to figure out when to pass or shoot the ball.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

The Ugly

— For the Christmas-themed halftime show, Franklin the Dog put on a blonde wig and lip-synced to All I Want For Christmas is You by Mariah Carey. If I had tomatoes to throw, I would have aimed one right at his noggin.

— Embiid rallied and all, but I’m not sure he should have stayed in this game through the second half. We’ll see what pops up on the injury report after this game, but he didn’t look right.

— For the love of god, play Jaden Springer!