When the Philadelphia 76ers put together this new group of players that buck the current trend of NBA small ball, one of the questions that always popped up was: who’s going to be the closer?
In 2018-19, that answer was Jimmy Butler. As Butler left for the Miami Heat in free agency, the Sixers needed to find other options to be that guy for them late in games to lead them to victory.
The easy answer to the above question in the offseason was Tobias Harris. After all, the Sixers had just re-signed him to a $180 million max contract and that should signal his place on the team. However, a myriad of options have all stepped up and have all done their job late in games from Harris to Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons as well as newcomer Josh Richardson.
On Saturday, it was Simmons who closed out the win on the defensive end and it goes to show that Philadelphia can have different guys close out games. Harris stated:
We continue to figure this out because we’re not fully there yet, but we’re taking the right steps game by game and we’re being able to kind of close out a lot of these close games, which is a good thing. We’re going to continue to find our balance and to really make sure that everybody is fed along the way. That’s going to be the biggest thing going forward with our team but, you know, all in all, we got the right guys the right personalities that want to win and that plays a big part of it.
The Sixers are only 20 games into what they expect to be a championship season so they have 62 games left in the season to really figure out who will fill that closer’s role, but they will have to figure it out come playoff time. Harris has the tools for the job and he continues to morph into a scorer for Philadelphia, but it will still take some time for everything to settle.
The Sixers will continue their growth as a team on Monday when they host the Utah Jazz. [lawrence-related id=20365,20357,20347]