Tobias Harris isn’t playing very well right now. Hasn’t played well this entire season, if we’re being honest.

He is, of course, trying to get back to full fitness after dealing with COVID-19, so we’ll always give the benefit of the doubt to pro athletes returning from that. Seth Curry struggled last season before turning it on in the playoffs, so no doubt the virus affects everybody differently, and there’s no fixed time frame for when a guy might begin to feel like himself again.

But if you watched Harris over these last few games, he just doesn’t seem like himself. At his best, he’s identifying mismatches, attacking close outs, and backing down smaller guys to shoot right over them. He improved his three-point shooting drastically over the years and was a borderline All Star in 2021 who shot 39.4% from three and better than 51% from the field. This season he’s down to 30.7% and 47.3%, respectively. Free throw shooting is down by five percentage points as well.

So what gives?

Let’s start with his season shot chart:

Only four quadrants there where he’s outperforming the league average by a significant margin. He’s hitting a good amount of shots in the paint and around the foul line while lagging behind in eight other quadrants.

There’s plenty of video to go through, but we’ll keep it simple and just look at Monday night’s film Memphis film:

Here’s what I see:

  1. nice floater, and-1.. that’s not really his game, but a positive sequence
  2. should have taken that catch and shoot three, instead stepped into a midrange pull-up
  3. open catch and shoot corner three, just missed it
  4. great backdoor cut and finish at the rim
  5. should have taken pull-up three when Kyle Anderson went under the Andre Drummond screen
  6. probably could have pulled the trigger there, but decided to try to drive on Jaren Jackson instead and was rejected at the rim
  7. not sure why he went for a floater there, 99 times out of 100 he just pulls up from the elbow and knocks that down
  8. catch and shoot corner three, miss
  9. nice shot over Dillon Brooks
  10. strong take against Brooks
  11. good catch and drive against Steven Adams, can’t finish at the rim
  12. rounds the corner, off-balance shot, blocked

There’s some good, some bad, and some head-scratching stuff in there. He had some nice corner looks and just didn’t hit them. And depending on how you view those possessions, there were easily 2-3 threes that he deferred on. The floater was strange to see (the second one), since that’s never been a big part of his game.

Overall, it just looks like the less-assertive Harris we saw at times during Brett Brown’s tenure. He’s so much better when the game is “automatic” for him, i.e. he’s making quick reads and driving off the catch, or just seeing those mismatches right away. There’s a bit of it in that clip above, but not as much as you’d like to see. It’s there; it just needs to be pulled out of him again.

Sixers gotta get him going, whatever it takes. He’s earning $35 million this season.