DETROIT (AP) — Tobias Harris had belief that few had when he chose to come back to play for the Detroit Pistons for a second time, signing with them two years ago when they had the NBA's worst record for a second straight season and set a single-season record for consecutive losses.
Detroit has had a remarkable turnaround and Harris has had a lot to do with it.
“We're not in this position if it isn't for him,” Pistons coach J.B. Bickerstaff said.
The veteran forward, approaching his 34th birthday, has been playing perhaps the best basketball of his career lately.
Harris has scored 20 or more points in six straight games, including a 21-point performance that helped Detroit beat the Cleveland Cavaliers 107-97 on Thursday night to take a 2-0 lead in their second-round series.
“There's no insecurity in who he is,” Bickerstaff said. "When you don’t have those insecurities in the moment, you can play free and you trust the work that you’ve put in.
“He knows his game. There’s so many guys that dribble, dribble, dribble. Tobias knows he can get you in the post. He might back you down. He might face you up, but he’s going to get to the same spot and raise up.”
Harris has helped lift up the Pistons to become one of the league's top teams, winning an Eastern Conference-high 60 games this season and earning a spot in the playoffs last year for the first time since 2019.
“It's amazing, just coming back and being part of the revival of this group,” he said.
Detroit won an NBA-low 14 games two years ago and set a single-season record with 28 straight losses, a season after winning a league-worst 17 games.
And, Harris still chose to return to the Motor City, where he played a decade earlier.
“I didn’t come back to this organization to lose,” he said. “I was making a decision based upon the guys in this locker room and the talent level that was there. It was obviously a huge goal to help this group get to the playoffs and see what can happen.”
Game 3 is Saturday in Cleveland.
“We did what we're supposed to do, protect home court,” Harris said. “We have got to go on the road and bring that same type of effort, same type of intensity and same type of desperation.”
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Detroit Pistons forward Tobias Harris (12) shoots a jump shot against Cleveland Cavaliers guard Max Strus (2) during the second half in Game 2 of a second-round NBA playoffs basketball series, Thursday, May 7, 2026, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Duane Burleson)
Cleveland Cavaliers forward Dean Wade, left, collides with Detroit Pistons forward Tobias Harris while driving to the basket during the second half in Game 2 of a second-round NBA playoffs basketball series Thursday, May 7, 2026, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Duane Burleson)
Cleveland Cavaliers center Jarrett Allen grabs a rebound away from Detroit Pistons forward Tobias Harris (12) during the first half in Game 2 of a second-round NBA playoffs basketball series, Thursday, May 7, 2026, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Duane Burleson)
A system that thousands of schools and universities use was offline Thursday during a cyberattack, creating chaos as students tried to study for finals and underscoring education’s dependence on technology.
The hacking group named ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach at Canvas, said Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emisoft. Instructure, the company behind Canvas, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment or questions about whether the system was taken down as a precaution or because the hackers knocked it offline.
Canvas is used to manage grades, course notes, assignments, lecture videos and more. The hacking group posted online that nearly 9,000 schools worldwide were affected, with billions of private messages and other records accessed, Connolly said.
Students quickly took to social media to ask if others were unable to access Canvas, with many panicking that they could no longer view course materials housed within the platform to study for their final exams.
Screen shots Connolly provided showed that the group began threatening Sunday to leak the trove of data, giving deadlines of Thursday and May 12. Connolly said the later date indicates that discussions regarding extortion payments may be ongoing.
Rich in digitized data, the nation’s schools are prime targets for far-flung criminal hackers, who are assiduously locating and scooping up sensitive files that not long ago were committed to paper in locked cabinets. Past attacks have hit Minneapolis Public Schools and the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Instructure has not posted about the attack on its social media.
Connolly said the Canvas attack is strikingly similar to a breach at PowerSchool, which also offers learning management tools. In that case a Massachusetts college student was charged.
Connolly described ShinyHunters as a loose affiliation of teenagers and young adults based in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. The group also has been tied to a other attacks, including one aimed at Live Nation’s Ticketmaster subsidiary.
Universities and school districts quickly began notifying students and parents.
“This is being reported as a national-level cyber-security incident,” the director of information technology at the University of Iowa's College of Public Health wrote in announcing that the school's online system was down. “Hopefully we will have a resolution soon.”
Virginia Tech acknowledged in a notice to students that the administration was aware of the effect on final exams and other end-of-semester activities. The University of New Mexico sent a similar message to the campus community, and the University of Florida urged students to stay alert for any phishing messages that appear to be from Canvas.
Teachers say they are having to find workarounds to help students study for exams and submit final assignments.
Damon Linker, a senior lecturer in the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a post on the social media platform X that his students had been relying on Canvas to access every reading from the semester and all of his lecture slides before their Monday final exams. The outage leaves students and faculty “dead in the water here in academia right now,” he said.
The student newspaper at Harvard reported that the system there was down as well. Students at Johns Hopkins University simply got an error message when trying to view their final grades on the platform Thursday. And public school districts also sought to reassure parents, with officials in Spokane, Washington, writing that they aren't “aware of any sensitive data contained in this breach.”
This story has been corrected to attribute a quote to the director of information technology at the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health, not the university's broader information technology lead.
Associated Press journalist Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City contributed.
FILE - People take photos near a John Harvard statue, left, on the Harvard University campus, Jan. 2, 2024, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)
