Instant observations: Tobias Harris bounces back in Sixers win over Hornets

Tobias Harris and Tyrese Maxey scored a combined 64 points on Friday night, powering the Sixers to a much-needed 121-114 win over the Charlotte Hornets.

Here’s what I saw.

The Good

— Nobody is going to be excited about Tobias Harris tearing up the Charlotte Hornets. I get it. We’ve been on this journey with him for a half-decade, so coming back to life against this sorry team isn’t going to make people forget the past few weeks.

With that out of the way, it was good to see Harris look like a normal basketball player again. His first shot of the game was an air-balled three on a late-clock shot, and it looked like a harbinger of disaster. The good news is that he didn’t use it as an excuse to fade into the background, and the threes kept coming, with Harris taking advantage of some lackadaisical defense from the Hornets. After getting a couple of threes to go down, there was a noticeable uptick of energy from Harris, who got after it on the glass and tried (read: failed) to jump into some passing lanes for turnover opportunities.

The Sixers were in dire need of a good Harris game because as he found his touch again, the rest of the team decided they were taking Friday night off. But rather than defaulting to “Give it to Tobi in the mid-post!” to ride the hot hand, Harris did a nice job of finding his shots within the flow of the offense, drifting into good floor-spacing spots and cutting for some easy buckets at the rim.

(There were some mid-post journeys for Harris, certainly, but they felt like good, timely offense. I will take that anytime.)

As the game wore on, Harris also managed to turn his good scoring night into value for his teammates. It was a solid, if unspectacular game for him as a playmaker, and given where his decision-making has been recently, it was a huge upgrade.

Perhaps most importantly, the Sixers opted to ride the hot hand down the stretch, with the Hornets hanging around far too long as a result of Philly’s defensive woes. Harris, looking as confident as he has in months, hit a beautiful baseline turnaround and a monster three from the corner, with no hesitation in the latter spot. After watching him struggle to even let a shot go for long stretches of this season, this was as good as it gets:

It was a full-circle moment, too, with Harris canning the exact sort of shot that he airballed to open things up.

You don’t have to take off your hater goggles. Yell that it’s just the Hornets until you’re blue in the face. I’m not even saying that’s wrong! But I must acknowledge that this was a good outing. When the shot comes along, the rest of his game tends to come along with it. It would be nice if they could get the secondary stuff even when he’s in a rough patch as a shooter, but c’est la vie.

— Good god almighty, Ricky Council IV was not playing around on this one:

He has had some thunderous dunks already in his young career, but this might top the list for the time being.

— I do not care to argue about Tyrese Maxey’s merit as a No. 1 option, because I don’t expect him to be one, nor are the Sixers designed for him to be one. Unfortunately, though, the Sixers are in a position where he has to be that guy every single night until Embiid comes back. He’s being hit with mixed coverages, top-assignment defenders, and constant attention from whoever they play, without the benefit of an MVP candidate to play off of.

So the results are going to be all over the place. You still get the flashes of brilliance, like Maxey dashing in from the perimeter for a tough reverse layup or a lofted two points in transition. He hit a beautiful stepback three from the corner in the second half, a shot that would have caused former teammate Danuel House Jr. to shed a tear if he was still on the team. But there are lots of fruitless drives to the hoop, with Maxey failing to garner sympathy from the officials on wild runners and floaters.

Perseverance has arguably been the most important trait for him lately. He did what he had to do (30+ against a bad Hornets team) even if it was in uninspiring fashion. Like we’ve said about Harris in the past, it’s much better to see Maxey power through early struggles when the alternative is hoping this shorthanded group can put it together with him playing passive basketball.

With a fully healthy team, I am open to conversations about the ills of volume scoring. But this team needs a volume scorer, and Maxey put together enough good moments in this game to get them over the line.

— Paul Reed responded to the Sixers’ lineup change in a big way, looking at Mo Bamba in a starter’s role and taking it personally. Nick Nurse has not been enamored with Reed’s shot selection lately, and it appears the message got through to No. 44.

This was a quintessential Reed game on offense — he was a menace on the offensive glass, but even as he kept popping up for second chances along the baseline, Reed kept his head up, looking for the best opportunity rather than his best opportunity. As a result of trying to make the right basketball play, the ball often ended up back in his hands, most notably when he got the ball back from Cam Payne on this lob finish:

No player benefits more from the Keep It Simple, Stupid line of thinking than Reed. He’s a great energy big when he stays in his lane. Leave the shooting and adventuring for other people.

— This was a rock-solid game from Kyle Lowry, even if he’s playing far too many minutes for my liking. You can see why Nick Nurse adores him and the Sixers made him a priority target on the buyout market — he’s a “little things” player with utility on and off the ball, which is difficult to find at any age or price level.

While Lowry might not be hyperactive in the mold of players like Buddy Hield or JJ Redick, he has an elite grasp of spacing. Lowry is constantly in search of relocation opportunities when he’s off-ball, and he’s also smart enough to know when he can hunker down in a spot, waiting for the offense to progress through its reads. He hit three triples against Charlotte, and the looks were good enough that he probably felt one or two more were going down.

And man, he’s got to be so annoying to play against. Lowry got at least one whistle from some “embellishment” on Friday night, and I can promise you it won’t be the last time that happens.

The Bad

— What happens when you lose your All-NBA center for a month-plus, play several small guards in your normal rotation, and lose multiple athletic wing options to bumps and bruises? If you answered that your defense goes off of a cliff, congratulations, you’ve been watching the Sixers recently.

Even if you fully believe in Kyle Lowry’s basketball IQ, and I would say I do, there’s just no way to work around how small the Sixers are right now. The Hornets are not exactly a jumbo team, and they were consistently able to punish Philly on cross-matches and second-chance opportunities. Tyrese Maxey got stuck on Grant Williams for a possession, and Williams made a mockery of Maxey on a putback chance. Nick Richards had Kyle Lowry defending him with the Hornets running, and the only way he would have made the ensuing basket look easier would have come from standing on his tiptoes for the layup. We’ve talked about this problem mostly through rebounding in recent weeks, but it hurts in quite a few ways on the defensive end.

It doesn’t help that Philadelphia’s bigs have various problems on that end, compounding the flaws of the smaller guys. Mo Bamba had a pretty good game by his standards, but asking him to defend in space remains a disaster, as he showed when he had to do anything other than stand at the rim and block shots. Paul Reed was much better, but he committed a foul on his very first possession off of the bench, which got a good chuckle out of me.

(Speaking of Reed, I continue to raise my eyebrow at him playing mostly drop coverage against pick-and-rolls. But the flip side is this — when so many guys you’d potentially switch with are little guards, it harms your ability to tap into Reed’s value as a switch defender.)

But I think the most glaring thing is that it’s hard to tell what the plan is possession-to-possession, which is a problem for a team that can’t just out-talent opponents. There are a lot of blown switches and late rotations for this group at the moment, which we can only call a problem of “newness” together for so long. They need to be mentally sharper across the board.

— As great as that dunk was for Council IV, the rest of his first-half stint was basically a disaster. He did a lot of self-creating, and though his trips to the basket have been fruitful so far this season, the well was dry against the Hornets.

I don’t necessarily place the blame on him — the drives were (mostly) good process, with Council attacking favorable matchups and getting about 80 percent of the way to a good look. His high volume was a direct result of the lack of shot creation around him. But 1/5 in five minutes is still 1/5 in five minutes.

The Ugly

— If this is how Tobias Harris responded to a one-hour chat with Joel Embiid, maybe the big guy needs to hold daily chats with every member of the rotation.

— I am not an Andre Drummond guy on a general level. But getting Drummond at the trade deadline might have been worth three or four wins between now and when Joel Embiid returns.

Paul Reed is capable of being an impact guy in a bench/reduced role. The issue is that Mo Bamba is the guy who would have to eat the minutes to reduce Reed’s role, and that’s not a viable option.