Sixers blown out by Knicks in another Tobias Harris stinkbomb

Tobias Harris submitted another entry in a growing list of embarrassing performances, scoring just two points in over 26 minutes during a 106-79 Sixers loss to the Knicks.

Here’s what I saw.

The Good

— Tyrese Maxey came off of a decent layoff and had more juice than the rest of the roster combined. It’s what you would expect from the All-Star in your lineup, but you had no idea how he might look following a “mild” concussion, so it was reassuring that he got right back to work.

If you’re asking me, this could have been a much prettier stat line for Maxey if his teammates shot the basketball like they’d played the sport before. The Knicks were throwing two guys at the ball on the vast majority of Tyrese Maxey’s pick-and-rolls, and he did an excellent job of navigating that pressure. His first drive of the game was a beauty — Maxey got all the way to the rim and threw a rope to the weakside corner, hitting his shooter right in the pocket. All that was left to do was for Tobias Harris to make a wide-open three.

(Narrator: he did not make the wide-open three.)

Maxey continued to make smart decisions and prioritize setting his teammates up, and they (mostly) let him down. So he shifted into scorer mode fairly early in this game, pulling up for some deep threes just to try to keep this offense afloat. It didn’t do a whole lot of good, but I came out of this game feeling okay about how he looks physically — he had the legs to make deep jumpers and the pace to get to the rim, which is all you can really hope for.

He’s the only guy who gets a pass for the hiccups elsewhere. That changes vs. Milwaukee on Thursday.

— I have come to appreciate Kelly Oubre to some extent. Even though he’s remarkably frustrating for a lot of reasons, I at least know that when I turn the game on, he’s going to attempt to play the game on his terms. With Tobias Harris just along for the ride in most of these games, you have some admiration for players who are at least trying to exert their will, misguided as their will might be.

He had the undisputed highlight of the first half for the Sixers, sauntering in the lane and detonating on poor Isaiah Hartenstein, who not only failed to stop him but picked up his third foul in the process:

He was also one of the few players to capitalize on Tyrese Maxey’s drive-and-kick ability, canning an open corner three late in the first quarter.

The Oubre experience is still a hell of a rollercoaster. There are possessions where he strays from Jalen freaking Brunson of all people, cheating toward the middle for no reason to set up an open catch-and-shoot three for his man. There are still some aimless drives into traffic, naturally, and his lack of a right hand gets punished by teams regularly.

At least he’s out there trying. More than I can say for some of these guys.

The Bad

— Paul Reed has more juice off-the-dribble right now than Tobias Harris. That’s not good!

— Buddy Hield can’t hit threes, but at least he also isn’t playing defense.

The Ugly

— I feel like I have to write a variation of “I’m not trying to pick on Tobias Harris” after every game. Maybe I should just straight-up bully him at this point, it’s not like it could make things any worse than they’re going right now. Every other game features some variation of all of us saying that it’s the worst half Harris has had in a Sixers uniform. This is just who he is — or at least, it’s who he has been lately.

What is it that Tobias Harris does to help this team right now? He isn’t a consistent floor spacer, because he’s hardly willing to take threes in the first place. His bread-and-butter possessions in the mid-post have been a disaster lately, so he hasn’t been able to serve as a run-stopper when the going gets tough. In fact, you can point to a moment in this game where he killed a run for his team.

The Sixers were cruising early in the third and had forced a Knicks timeout with pace-and-space basketball. Harris promptly missed a layup, leading to a Donte DiVincenzo transition three. A brutal turnover followed for Harris on the next possession, when he got the ball on the wing with 10 on the shot clock, wasted six seconds, and then barreled into the paint with no plan at all. The only reason he wasn’t able to force a hot potato on another teammate is because he traveled first, and when the Knicks got the ball back, Jalen Brunson promptly scored an and-one at the rim. The run was dead.

Every attempt to try to get Harris going was a waste of time and energy, bleeding the clock without generating any positive momentum. There is nothing he did well in this game. There’s little he has done well for quite a while.

Nick Nurse has shown little inclination to change his role, even as other guys have been shifted into different spots in the rotation. Mo Bamba is in a starting spot despite largely being bad. Buddy Hield had a tough stretch and got moved to a reserve role, with Nurse showing no fear of demoting him during a contract year that might lead to an eventual long-term pact with the Sixers. Cam Payne’s role fluctuates every night. And then there’s Harris, who is nailed on as one of their heaviest-minute players no matter what is happening on a given night.

To a degree, I get it. There would be a lot more scrutiny from changing Harris’ role, and he always pulls out a nice performance just when you’ve given up on him. But they simply aren’t getting enough out of him, and he has been fortunate to have a nailed-on spot as a starter and closer despite that.

— A split with the Knicks in a two-game miniseries is more than acceptable in the circumstances, especially when you consider the grind of Sunday night’s win. They found a way to dig one out despite a horrific offensive showing two days prior, and all anyone would have hoped for in this one was a professional performance.

What they got instead was a complete disaster. There have been way too many of these games where the Sixers just get blitzed for a quarter or two at a time, leaving them in need of a miracle just to make the game close. It’s dispiriting, it has to be rage-inducing for fans, and I can only imagine what is going through the mind of Joel Embiid, who is battling to return to the floor while watching this nonsense night after night.

They all bear some responsibility for the failures on defense, because we watched markedly different performances against the same team two days apart. Granted, OG Anunoby’s return gave the Knicks a little bit of extra firepower for this one, but that had little to do with Philadelphia’s defensive struggles. The connectivity that we saw on Sunday evaporated into the New York air, with late rotations and poor awareness plaguing all four quarters against the Knicks.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it 1000 times — the Sixers do not have the personnel to simply take plays off, let alone entire stretches of the game. And yet there they were on national TV at the Garden, failing to make a low-man rotation on a pick-and-roll, or failing to make the follow-up read once the help came at the rim. It is a group of guys operating as if the responsibility is always someone else’s, and there’s seemingly little concern about fixing it.

Nick Nurse needs to figure out a solution, and he needs it fast. He has a team filled with guys on expiring contracts who have crumbled without their star. They have a decent amount of “team-first guys” in theory, but we may be past the point of that mattering. This group needs some shared buy-in, and I’m not sure where it’s going to come from.