The Philadelphia 76ers entered Saturday shorthanded as they took on the Cleveland Cavaliers at home. They were missing their star forward in Tobias Harris who was out with a knee injury. All season, he has stepped up and is having a terrific year on both ends of the floor.
The Sixers had trouble creating any offense outside of stars Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons and they also had trouble on the glass in the loss to Cleveland. Both of those are areas that Harris helps this team in. He can create his own look with his physicality and he is also a good rebounder as well so they really missed him in that sense.
“We saw it in the half-court,” said Embiid. “Posting me up gave us a lot of looks. We scored a lot out of that, whether it was me or me kicking out the ball and swinging it to the other side, but it’s hard to just keep on doing that. It becomes easier for the other teams to guard and now you have another perimeter threat like Tobias where you can give him the ball, run the pick-and-roll, and also post him. I think that’s where we missed him a lot in the half-court offense.”
Harris is averaging 20.2 points and 7.5 rebounds while shooting over 51% from the floor and over 41% from deep. Those are tough numbers to replace with anybody.
“That’s 20 and 10 pretty much,” said Danny Green. “You miss him especially as another perimeter shooter, another scorer, a guy who can get to the free-throw line. A bigger guy who can defend a little bit, rebound, we got out-rebounded tonight. So yeah, we definitely missed him tonight.”
On the flip side, the Sixers are the top team in the East for a reason. They should have been able to fill in for Harris against the 14th placed team in the East in Cleveland. This was a game they still have to go out and win.
“He’s Tobias Harris,” said Simmons. “Second leading scorer on the team. He’s a big presence for us. At the end of the day, we got to get those wins regardless of who’s out. That’s a win we got to get.”
A loss in February is not crippling to a team in the 1 seed, but losses like these can hurt when things get tight at the end of the season and teams are fighting for home-court advantage in the playoffs. Harris will be a key part of everything, but they still need to beat teams like the Cavaliers without him.
“Hopefully, he comes back soon, but regardless of who we didn’t have on the floor who was healthy or injured, we have to come out and play,” Green added. “We gotta do 48 minutes. We have no excuses. We got to find ways to win.”
The Sixers will host the Indiana Pacers on Monday.
This post originally appeared on Sixers Wire! Follow us on Facebook!
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