Ben Simmons might be the Sixers’ real MVP. His injury means Tobias Harris must earn his contract. | David Murphy

All we can say for sure is that Tobias Harris is going to get a chance to make his bosses look like they know a thing or two about a thing or two. Everything else is contingent on the Sixers announcing something of substance with regard to Ben Simmons’ back.

The update they offered before Monday’s game against the Hawks was about as meaty as one of those vegan hamburgers. Call it the Impossible Prognosis — it sounds like news, but it’s not. That’s not a knock on them — medical decisions can be complex things, especially when the decision involves a part of the body like the back. But apart from the club’s acknowledgment that it is working with Simmons’ representatives to determine a game plan for his injury, we don’t have much to go on.

Still, you only need a little bit of inductive reasoning to conclude that the Sixers are not planning on this being a short absence. For one, a short-term injury generally does not require extensive consultation with a player’s representatives. There’s also the fact that a team will typically label a player “day to day” if it expects a player back on the court in the near future. That prognosis does not always turn out to be true, particularly with regard to the Sixers. In fact, given the club’s rather gratuitous history with its day-to-day designation, it will be a small victory if Simmons arrives at his next public appearance with all of his appendages intact. But it is fair to assume that he will not be days away from playing competitive basketball.

More than anything, the words that echoed the loudest were the ones spoken by the head coach. On most occasions, Brett Brown can obfuscate with the best of them, his words less like bread crumbs pointing in an unspoken direction and more like a Spirograph in an infinite loop. On Monday, he did not even bother to attempt to suspend everybody’s belief.

“With 25 games left, we’ve taken a hit with Ben," Brown said. “I’m not spinning it: It’s an opportunity for us to learn. We’re going to learn something. We’re going to find something.”

Which brings us back to where we started. The Sixers are going to learn a lot of somethings for however long Simmons remains on the sideline. First and foremost, they are going to find out whether the last two months have been a mirage, or if Simmons really has surpassed Joel Embiid in his importance to the roster.

Embiid did his best to challenge that assumption on Monday night, scoring a career-high 49 points while protecting the rim with a series of high-decibel blocks in a 129-112 win. And it might not be a fair comparison in the first place, given the uniqueness of both players’ skill sets. But the fact remains, over the last couple of months, Simmons has stamped the Sixers with his unmistakable imprint, the team going largely as he goes, while Embiid has often looked like a fraction of the player he was before he tore a finger ligament in his left hand.

» READ MORE: Sixers observations: Ben Simmons’ back injury, another blown lead, Tobias Harris emerges. Oh, and Joel Embiid | David Murphy

That’s not as much an indictment of the big man as it is a testament to the level of play we’ve seen from his running mate. In the 20 games leading up to his early exit from Saturday’s loss to the Bucks, Simmons was averaging 21.2 points and hitting 61.3% of his 13.5 shots per game, compared with 14.4 points, a .561 shooting percentage and 10.5 field goal attempts in his first 33 games. In addition to his All-NBA-caliber defense — which, we remind you, impacts the same percentage of a game’s possessions as his offense — Simmons has blossomed into one of those rare players without whom you struggle to imagine a team surviving.

The most obvious conundrum currently facing Brown is the one he spent much of his time discussing during Monday’s pregame media availability. The Sixers coach has spent much of the season coming to grips with the fact that he does not have a point guard who would qualify as a capable backup on most contenders, let alone a team that once-upon-a-time thought it so necessary to have a second ball handler complementing Simmons in its starting backcourt that it traded up and drafted one with the No. 1 overall pick. Against the Hawks, Brown went with Shake Milton next to Josh Richardson in the backcourt, which gave them a starting point guard only in a world where 50% of an ideal point guard times two equals 100%.

But while it is true that the Sixers do not have an obvious half-court creator to plug in for Simmons, it is also true that they were in need of one even when Simmons was healthy. What they really lose with his absence is a two-way force who could play stopper-level defense on one end of the court and who was blossoming into a legitimate primary scoring option on the other. It’s that second facet of the game where their offseason decision-making will have a chance to prove prescient.

When the Sixers signed Harris to a five-year, $180 million contract in July, the conventional wisdom said that they’d paid an elite price for a player who was only pretty good. The Sixers’ up-and-down play on offense this season has offered ample opportunity to question their wisdom last offseason. They’ve often appeared in need of either a dynamic shot creator or a knockdown shooter, and Harris has been neither. He’s been fine. Hardly a liability. But there is an opportunity cost to minutes and dollars, and it’s fair to wonder the Sixers ended up on the right side of the substitution calculus.

But that could change if Simmons misses an extended period of time and Harris plays as he did in Monday’s win over the Hawks, when he scored 25 points on 9-of-18 shooting and connect on four of his six threes.

“Everything’s a balance,” Harris said. “I think that’s been a thing we’ve been trying to figure out all year, how we can have that good balance game to game.”

If Monday was any indication, the Sixers will have a lot less weight on their scale in the coming weeks. But they invested heavily in star power for a reason, and Harris now has a chance to make that money look smart.