Negrodamus wrote:Arsenal wrote:Negrodamus wrote:Lol, that's not his job. Down the stretch, we need to rely on our actual stars to close out the game. He serves as the middle of the game 20 ppg scorer that keeps pace with the other team so we don't get blown out due to not running a decent offense since we lack an actual PG or alpha backcourt creator/scorer.
And leadership isn't determined by 4th quarter scoring. I don't understand why that metric is being the unit of measurement for leadership.
Except he failed in this. Tobi + bench units that were supposed to keep us afloat instead got destroyed.
Over the last 3 seasons since he's been here, Tobi shrinks just as much, if not more, than Ben in the clutch.
He's an 82 game player not a 16 game player. Just like Ben.
Where do you think the 20 ppg that he scores would come from if he was omitted from the lineup in the Atlanta series? In the game he scored 4 points, it took role player Seth Curry scoring twice his playoff average (36 points) and another 37 herculean effort from Embiid to keep us close. I don't get why it matters when the points are being contributed. If Tobi was scoring 20ppg and anyone else showed up, literally anyone else (especially our second star), we win this series.
Also, I don't really care about anything other than this last season. The ironic part of this conversation is that I was ready to ship him out of Philly for cap relief the previous season. That's how little I thought of his game, leadership be damned. After watching him be one of the only two consistent contributors (the other being Embiid) on this roster in the playoffs, I don't feel hellbent on sending him out. Continuity and relationships are extremely important in this game too.
The same place his 20.9 ppg came from when he was shipped out as the leading scorer of that Clippers team a few years back that went on to make the playoffs anyways while Jerry West laughed all the way to the bank. The team didn't skip a beat and his bloated production (2's instead of 3's. No free throw volume) was dispersed within internally.
Harris statistically creates no net increase with Embiid+Simmons lineups. He's an empty stats merchant. This is put on full display when he has to be the best player on his five man unit for any stretch of game run.
He does provide somewhat consistent scoring and that's a valuable trait, in the same way Marcus Morris, Harrison Barnes, Danilo Gallinari and Bojan Bogdanovic do for their teams - but these aren't go to isolation scorers and you'd never pay them like one.
Khris Middleton separated himself from this tier specifically for his ability to get a bucket at the end of games. He can also pass the ball quite well.
Tobias isn't a bad player by any means as long as you keep it within the context that he's just a little game player that makes far too much money and is nearly 30 years old. Some people want Ben gone so bad they'll look past the fact that this guy hasn't stepped up once in the series' we've gone on to lose in three consecutive years.