Curtain's Barely Up On Sixers' Season, But Tobias Harris, Al Horford Assume Starring Roles

It is exceedingly rare that a plot twist in any narrative would come early in Act One, but there it was for the Sixers on Saturday night in Detroit, in their second game of the season: Joel Embiid out (already!) with a sprained ankle/lacerated lip. New protagonists needed.

Entering, stage right: Tobias Harris and Al Horford. And ... action!

Harris, looking every bit like the $180 million man the team made him in the offseason, poured in 16 of his 29 points in the third quarter, when the Sixers erased a 13-point deficit. And Horford, looking every bit like the Embiid fill-in the team has so desperately needed, packed 11 of his 23 points into a game-clinching 15-5 flurry in the closing minutes, as the Sixers emerged with a 117-111 victory.

Granted, the Pistons are hardly championship-caliber, and they too were short-handed, as Blake Griffin (hamstring/knee) and Reggie Jackson (back) both sat out. But the biggest takeaways are these: Harris can be a go-to guy in big spots. And the Sixers appear to have solved their backup center worries.

Both things were enormous factors in last year's loss to Toronto in the Eastern Conference semifinals. Harris struggled, averaging 14 points on 38 percent shooting (28 percent from 3). And the Sixers, who at that point had four other centers on the roster besides Embiid ( Amir Johnson, Boban Marjanovic, Greg Monroe and Jonah Bolden) flat-lined whenever the two-time All-Star sat: They were plus-90 when he was on the floor, minus-119 when he was not. (Overall, Philadelphia was 9-10 in the games Embiid missed last season, including playoffs.)

The Sixers signed Horford, a 33-year-old entering his 13th season, to a four-year, $109 million contract in the offseason, in hopes of alleviating those concerns. While he will most often start at power forward, he is fully capable of swinging over to center when Embiid sits or rests, as was clear down the stretch Saturday. With the Sixers nursing a 101-97 lead and 4:13 remaining, they ran a play for Horford that they used to run for JJ Redick. He set a brush screen for Ben Simmons at the top of the circle, faded to a spot on the right wing, behind the 3-point arc, took Simmons' pass and drilled a triple (as shown at :29 of this video).

That's right - a guard play, for a veteran big.

Horford, who notched 15 points in the fourth quarter in all, added a three-point play on a fast-break feed from Simmons, after one of Simmons' career-high seven steals. (Simmons also finished with 13 points and 10 assists). Then Horford drove past Andre Drummond for a dunk - again on the aforementioned Redick-like play - and nailed another 3-pointer, with the shot clock expiring and 2:28 left in the game.

That's 11 straight Philadelphia points, over a span of 1:45, putting the Sixers up 114-102. As The Zink used to say, drive home safely ... if you drove.

As for Harris, his performance was such that teammate Mike Scott - excellent in his own right, with 17 points in just over 22 minutes off the bench - couldn't say enough good things afterward.

"He reads books," Scott told sideline reporter Serena Winters at one point.

There has never been any doubt about Harris' intelligence, nor his decency - just last week, for instance, he donated $1 million to nine different charities - but his performance against Toronto last year raised questions about whether he could be depended upon in the clutch. Was he just a guy who had put up good stats on bad teams throughout his career? Was he too content to take a back seat to Embiid, Simmons and, at that point, Jimmy Butler?

On Saturday night, we saw the first evidence of a new narrative - for Harris, and for the team as a whole. And while they are still early in Act One, it portends a happy ending.