The worldwide basketball audience that relies on media giants like ESPN for the latest trends can tell you all about what’s going on with the Lakers and the Warriors and likely the Knicks and Celtics, but after that it gets a little sketchy.
At least until the playoffs roll around, attention intensifies and the view can narrow to the teams that survived the 82-game grind of the regular season. And so it was that in the playoffs, the basketball universe came to be aware of the role that Tobias Harris played in the Pistons taking a gravity-defying U-turn from 14 wins to 44 and the No. 6 seed in the Eastern Conference.
Asked during the postseason to quantify the impact Harris had on one of the NBA’s very youngest rosters, J.B. Bickerstaff cued up a speech he’d given in some form virtually every week since training camp had opened nearly seven months earlier.