With Joel Embiid injured again, James Harden can show the Sixers how much money he deserves

The tremors have been there all season, conspicuous little rumbles from deep beneath the surface. They have come at an interval and magnitude that suggests some level of pre-planning: too small to cause structural damage, too big for the 76ers to ignore. Christmas Day, the All-Star break, the eve of the playoffs, each of them bringing another drip or trickle of information that suggested James Harden was seriously contemplating a return to Houston ahead of his likely free agency this summer.

Whatever the intended message, the effective one was this: the Sixers are going to have to pay up in order to keep Harden around beyond this season. If they aren’t willing to do so, he is more than willing to hit the road.

That may seem like a strange entry point for the Sixers’ 96-88 win over the Nets in Game 4 of the Eastern Conference quarterfinals on Saturday afternoon, which capped off the team’s first playoff series sweep since 1991 and secured themselves a spot in the conference semifinals, likely against the Boston Celtics. But these are the Sixers, and the plotlines are rarely normal this time of year. Truth be told, we’ve reached a point where maybe this is normal. For the third straight season, the big story of the clinching game in the first round was their MVP center’s uncertain status for the start of the second round.

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Sixers coach Doc Rivers said after Saturday’s win there was only a 50% chance that Joel Embiid’s sprained right knee would be healthy enough for the big man to play in Game 1 of the second round. Already, Embiid’s absence from Game 4 made this the third straight postseason and the fifth of his career that he will miss at least one game due to injury. The big question now is whether the Sixers are any better equipped to survive without him.

That’s where Harden comes in.

In theory, the Sixers acquired Harden to be Embiid’s equal, a second superstar who is as capable of single-handedly carrying the team on his shoulders. Put the two of them together, and you’d have a superstar duo capable of winning a championship. But another part of Harden’s appeal was the idea that the Sixers would still have a chance whenever Embiid wasn’t there. That’s what kind of price the Sixers paid 14 months ago, when they shipped Ben Simmons, Seth Curry, and two first-round picks to the Nets in exchange for Harden. More importantly, it’s the price that Harden is likely expecting to be paid when he hits free agency this summer.

Daryl Morey is going to have a lot of big decisions to make in the coming months, and the biggest one might be whether it makes sense to guarantee Harden $210 million over the next four seasons, including a salary in the neighborhood of $60 million in his 37-year-old season. That’s the maximum that the Sixers can offer Harden per the NBA collective bargaining agreement. The next couple of weeks will show whether he is worth it.

That’s especially true now. Even if Embiid is healthy enough to play in Game 1 in 7-10 days, his body will almost certainly be operating at some fraction of full health. Last year, that doomed the Sixers, who lost their first two semifinal games against the Miami Heat without Embiid and then lost two of the next four as he battled through the after-effects of a concussion and torn thumb ligament. They were a team that was lacking depth and the right mixture of complementary parts. Even more than that, they were missing a primary scorer who could carry them like Embiid. Now, we’ll see whether a healthy and well-conditioned Harden can be that player.

The signs were mixed during the Sixers’ sweep of the Nets. In a Game 1 blowout, Harden looked a lot closer to his old self than he had at the same point last year. He connected on seven of his 13 three-point attempts, several of them the vintage step-back jumper that he did not have the legs to execute last season. He attempted 21 field goals, three more than he had in any of his previous playoff games with the Sixers. He finished the game with 23 points and 13 assists and looked darn good doing it.

The last three games? A different story. Since Game 1, Harden has shot just 7-of-22 from three-point range while averaging 15.3 points. He has certainly been an asset, which he exemplified at various junctures Saturday while scoring 17 points with 11 assists. But there were also plenty of moments that suggested Harden simply is no longer a player capable of being a primary scorer on a championship-caliber team.

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Take, for instance, the final 1:28 of the first half, when the Sixers did not score a bucket and saw the Nets enter the locker room with a seven-point lead. That stretch included a Sixers possession where Harden was stuffed from behind by the Nets’ Nic Claxton and then missed a 13-foot jumper after the Sixers came up with the offensive rebound. Those were two of the nine shots he missed inside the paint. That included misses on 8-of-9 shots around the rim. In fact, Harden finished the series having missed an incredible 18 of his 25 attempts from point-blank range.

“It was a lot more attack, attack, attack over the course of a 40-minute game,” Harden said. “I had plenty of opportunities. I just didn’t make them.”

Harden’s struggles in the paint aren’t going away. Over the last two regular seasons, he has has shot just .603 from around inside three feet, a drop of nearly 50 points from the .648 he averaged between 2011-21. That still leaves plenty of room for positive regression to the mean after this series. But there is clearly a certain level of athleticism that isn’t coming back. Another small example: During the first 11 years of his career, Harden averaged 30 dunks per season. Over the last three seasons combined, he has dunked the ball exactly 11 times, including once this season.

So, if Harden is no longer a superstar scorer, does it make sense for the Sixers to give him the sort of contract that is typically reserved for such players? On the one hand, they may not have a choice, given that the NBA’s salary cap rules prevent them from simply allocating that money to another player. On the other hand, how confident are they that Embiid will be around to give Harden the partner he needs for the next four years?

“I told myself this year, I’m all in on sacrifice,” Harden said. “Whether it’s the money or my role, just letting everything go and just sacrificing and seeing what it gives me. . . . Throughout the entire year, people didn’t expect me to be the scoring James Harden or the James Harden that goes out there and gets 40, 50 points and people talk, ‘Oh, you can’t win like that.’ And then it’s like, I go out there and get 20 points and 11 assists and it’s, ‘He’s not the old James Harden any more’. . . . Sacrifice is the word I’m going to continue to use for this year and see where it gets me.”

Note the two words he used. This year. There was no mention of the next one.