Tobias Harris’ missed opportunity, an ex-Eagle’s shot at Philly fans, and other thoughts

First and final thoughts …

Tobias Harris had been a 76er for less than seven months when he received an invitation that, in light of the last month, is the ultimate of ironies. In the summer of 2019, Kobe Bryant reached out to several standout NBA players, including Harris, and offered them the chance to come to a minicamp in Thousand Oaks, Calif., that he was hosting. Two days of tutelage from the Black Mamba and competition against the top peers in his profession — Harris was never going to say no. He had admired Bryant for too long.

“He would just rely on his work ethic to push him through,” Harris said in a phone interview in 2021, “and I take all those things into consideration, of course, in how I kind of implement and go about it, just continue to work. I think he was one of the best in his career. Ups and downs, nothing really fazed him on the floor.”

Harris is Bryant’s opposite in that regard; too much seems to faze him. Joel Embiid’s meniscus surgery and absence had opened up another opportunity for Harris to live up to the bet that Sixers general manager Elton Brand made on him five years ago. Brand acquired him in a gigantic trade with the Clippers, then signed him to a five-year extension worth $180 million. The gamble underlying those moves was that Harris had the skills and, more important, the character to grow into a player who would justify a max contract.

Brand was partly right: Harris is, by all indications, a terrific person. He’s just not a killer on the court. He’s never been anything more than a second fiddle here, and lately he has been less than that. Over a seven-game stretch ahead of Friday — a stretch in which the Sixers went 2-5 — Harris shot just 35% from the field and 27% from three-point range and averaged just 12.6 points. He bounced back Friday with 31 points and 12 rebounds in the Sixers’ 121-114 victory over the Hornets, but until then, he had struggled so badly that Sixers coach Nick Nurse took him aside Thursday to talk about in-game measures and strategies to try to get him back on track.

» READ MORE: Sielski: Joel Embiid wants to come back to save the Sixers. He needs to come back to save his legacy.

“It’s on him,” Nurse said. “My thing is always just that I want him to let it come to him a little bit, and I certainly want him to do other things. He’s still got to defend and rebound and draw offense for other people and set screens and make sure it’s not just like you’re totally wrapped up in trying to get off the slump or whatever it is. But I think he’s doing that.”

In the end, Harris is doing more harm to himself than to the Sixers if he continues to play poorly. He’s in a contract year, and the worse he performs, the more likely it is that the Sixers will happily accept the salary-cap space that will be freed up once his contract is off the books. Unless Harris, over the regular season’s final month-and-a-half, lifts his game to a level it has never consistently been since he joined the Sixers, he’ll leave here having never fulfilled the promise that Bryant and Brand saw in him.

Former Eagles cornerback Steven Nelson restarted a familiar discussion around here the other day when, in a podcast conversation with Darius Slay, he lamented the treatment he received from the team’s fans.

“I knew quick I had to get up out of there,” Nelson, who started all 16 regular-season games for the Eagles in 2021, said on his podcast, The Corner Suite. “It wasn’t good for my mental health. They’re gonna be on your ass on the bench after every play.”

Invariably, the reaction to episodes like this falls on one of two poles. Either Philly fans are the most unreasonable jerks in all of American sports, or the athlete/coach who complains about them is the wussiest wuss who ever set foot on a field of play. Enough has changed, though, about fans here and athletes everywhere that those extremes don’t quite apply anymore.

» READ MORE: Sielski: Eagles' A.J. Brown said a lot on WIP. Here's what he got right and wrong.

A lot of fans around here are softer, yes. So are a lot of the media. So are a lot of the athletes. For better and worse.

Hard to believe it has been nearly 20 years since St. Joseph’s just-about-perfect season. And every time I watch the closing seconds of the Hawks’ Elite 8 loss to Oklahoma State, I still think Pat Carroll is going to poke away that loose ball before it ends up in the hands of John Lucas III.