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Tobias Harris #12 of the Detroit Pistons

It is just a fact that, over the course of 15 seasons in the NBA, Pistons forward Tobias Harris will be the first guy scapegoated when things go awry with his team. Harris has played for five teams in his lengthy career, and is in his second stint with the Pistons. In sizing up the production and future of the Detroit roster after this season’s impressive 60-win season, Harris is usually the first guy most want off the team in 2026-27, after he hits free agency this summer.

But over the course of this exhausting seven-game opening-round series for Detroit, Harris has surely changed some minds. Because outside of star point guard Cade Cunningham, none of the bright young future cornerstones of the Pistons came up big consistently big in the playoffs, and none of the veteran role players lived up to their billing quite like Harris did.

On Sunday, the Pistons beat one of Harris’ old teams, the Magic, 116-94, to complete a remarkable comeback from a 3-1 deficit in the series. Cunningham starred, with 32 points and 12 assists, but it was the 33-year old Harris who was the Pistons’ second-best player.

JB Bickerstaff: ‘Can’t Say (Expletive) About Tobias Harris’

Harris wrapped up the game with 30 points, shooting 11-for-17 from the field and added nine rebounds, three steals and a block in the game. Most important as the Pistons move into the conference semifinals, Harris located his 3-point shot, which had been a struggle through the first six games (19.4%). He was 5-for-7 from the arc on Sunday.

Coach JB Bickerstaff needed only the slightest prompt before he began to gush praise about Harris in his postgame press conference.

Said Bickerstaff: “Nobody can say (expletive) to me about Tobias Harris. Right? He is dependable, reliable, prepared for the moment. He’s a leader, he’s a great teammate. He’s a great human being. You know, he’s a high-level competitor. To show up tonight and do what he did when it was on the line the most, it’s exceptional.

“I can come up with more adjectives if you want, but I think you get my drift.”

Pistons Stayed in the Moment

After the game, Harris appeared on ESPN’s “Inside the NBA,” and talked about what the Pistons had achieved in coming back and securing the win, albeit over the No. 8 seed. He pointed out that the Pistons have been able to take these games 12 minutes at a time, and indeed, after falling to the brink of elimination with their loss in Game 4, Detroit won eight of the final 12 quarters of the series.

Said Harris: “I think part of this group, we do a really good job of just staying in the moment, our staff has been preaching to us all year, eliminate all the noise and the chaos outside and just be ready to play basketball. We knew when we got down, 3-1, that those games we lost, we were not ourselves. So, we just stayed with it.

“Internally, we had the belief that we were going to come back in this series. We just chopped it down, every quarter, we have to win. I thought coach JB, all these guys came together and had this goal to come back in this series and we were able to do it. Spectacular for us as a team, but we know there is more work to do.”