March 11, 2026
Eric Hartline/Imagn Images
Cam Payne set the Sixers franchise record for made threes without a miss on Tuesday, knocking down all eight of his long-range tries.
PHILADELPHIA – The routine of NBA postgame media availabilities can grow monotonous.
When a team loses, its best player or two from the game will go to the podium and speak. One or two more will address reporters at their lockers. Players are generally motivated to get out as quickly as possible after losses; nobody wants to bask in defeat.
When a team wins, two standout performers get podium games. Another two or three will talk at their lockers. It is a busier scene for media members, staffers in public relations and players alike. After the Sixers' dramatic and emotional win over the Memphis Grizzlies on Tuesday night, however, the scene inside Xfinity Mobile Arena was unusual, both for reasons related and unrelated to what had just transpired on the court.
A glimpse at the postgame scene on Tuesday night:
The first sign that things were going to be unconventional after Tuesday's game: it took a long while for the winning locker room to open up following Sixers head coach Nick Nurse's press conference. Former Sixers wing Robert Covington was standing in the same hallway. Cam Payne, the Sixers' star of the night, walked by Covington and told him "I needed your aura today."
As he walked back to his office, Nurse looked to reporters who had just informed him of what was transpiring in Miami for another update. VJ Edgecombe walked by reporters, holding his phone sideways. Asked if he was watching the same thing as everyone else, he nodded in the affirmative.
The locker room did not open until the Miami Heat's win over the Washington Wizards went final – not because of the ongoing race for a playoff spot in a packed Eastern Conference between a group of teams including the Sixers and Heat, but because Heat star Bam Adbeayo had just scored 83 points, surpassing Kobe Bryant's famous 81-point game for the second-highest single-game scoring total in the history of the NBA.
As reporters watched the Heat-Wizards game standing outside of the locker room, Adebayo reached 81 points, then got the ball and drew a foul. As it happened, there were screams coming from behind the closed door nearby.
Adebayo checked out of the game, the buzzer sounded in Miami and suddenly the door to the locker room was open. A brief survey of Sixers moving in and out indicated not a single player on the team had not been watching Adebayo make history. One player, presumably frustrated to see the legendary Bryant's 81 points topped, yelled out an expletive. The entire room was in a state of shock.
Edgecombe was the first player to speak to reporters. After talking about all things Sixers and his return from a three-plus-game absence, the 20-year-old rookie was asked about Adebayo's 83-point game.
"That's fire, that's fire," Edgecombe said. "Shoutout Bam. Shoutout Bam. Congrats to him. Yeah, man, that's all I got. He got, what 83? Second all-time. That's amazing, man. Shoutout Bam, too."
Edgecombe grew up a LeBron James fan without much of an emotional attachment to Bryant. James was a member of the Heat during Edgecombe's childhood; Miami is awfully close to The Bahamas, where Edgecombe grew up. But Kelly Oubre Jr., who recorded the first 30-point, 10-rebound game of his career and went to the podium after Payne to conclude the night, admitted he was not thrilled to see Bryant, one of his favorite players of all time, one-upped. He credited and commended Adebayo anyways. He paused and got in one quick jab, a reference to teammate Joel Embiid's 70-point game two seasons ago.
"I'm just going to say this: Joel did it efficiently and he did it in three quarters," Oubre said.
No quotes provided about Adebayo in Philadelphia on Tuesday will trump what Payne said. On any other night, even a journeyman backup point guard could have sparked headlines around the NBA with a performance like Payne's. He scored 32 points and notched 10 assists, three rebounds, three steals and two blocks off the bench, all while shooting 9-for-10 from the field and 8-for-8 from the field. It was the best performance of Payne's long NBA career by far, and one of the best individual performances in the NBA this season when accounting for his absurd efficiency. It was an all-around masterclass which swung a loss into a win for the Sixers:
Cam Payne had the best game of his NBA career in the Sixers' win over Memphis on Tuesday:
— Adam Aaronson's clips (@SixersAdamClips) March 11, 2026
32 points (9-10 FG, 8-8 3P, 6-6 FT)
10 assists
3 rebounds
3 steals
2 blocks
0 turnovers
Full highlights: pic.twitter.com/GGhLr89Pb6
After fielding questions about his stellar showing for five minutes, Payne was finally asked about Adebayo. His answer was equal parts honest and hilarious.
"I was worried about Cam Payne, honestly," Payne said. "Man, Bam can't take my night. Shoutout to Bam, though. I'm a big-time Kobe fan, so that's huge, for someone to score that many points in a game. But, man, I'm taking it, man. This is my night. March 10, it's all me."
In actuality, the most meaningful development pertaining to the Sixers on Tuesday night came about 30 minutes prior to tip-off, when the team announced that Tyrese Maxey would miss at least three weeks due to his right finger sprain. With Embiid already out without a timeline to return and Paul George's suspension continuing for another two weeks, the Sixers could be severely undermanned for a strikingly long period of time, just when their games feel like must-win contests.
Edgecombe, slated to be the team's primary ball-handler moving forward, said "you can't replace Tyrese," that Maxey has been "our best player all year" and that "it sucks for him to go down, but now everyone else has to step up."
The Sixers will need more performances like the one he submitted on Tuesday. Nurse credited Edgecombe with changing the energy of the game with his hustle and intensity late in the third quarter, eventually prompting a dominant run in the fourth quarter. They are not going to get historically great efficiency from Payne moving forward – in addition to being the first Sixers reserve to score 30 points in a game this season, the 31-year-old set the franchise record for made threes in a game without missing – but they could use some consistent offensive punch from him off the bench. Quentin Grimes, primed to start next to Edgecombe moving forward, had a strong night, too.
But it is very obvious that Maxey, who had only missed two of the Sixers' first 63 games before hurting his finger in a collision with teammate Adem Bona, is legitimately irreplaceable – not just for his brilliance, but for the volume at which he produces. Maxey is still far and away the NBA leader in both total minutes and minutes per game.
As Embiid and George have been shuffled in and out of the lineup all year, Maxey has been the constant. Now, he is gone for at least the rest of March. Even an unusually upbeat locker room in awe of NBA history being made experienced sobering glimpses into reality: they are facing an enormously difficult challenge in the weeks ahead.
"Obviously, it's a huge blow for him. He's having an All-NBA season," Nurse said. "Just hoping it heals really, really quick and he gets back to where it doesn't bother him at all. I don't know. That's all I can say. He's obviously played tremendous, and [his absence] obviously puts us in a bind with some of the other guys out, too. But just hopefully these, whatever, two, three weeks will whiz by and he'll be ready to go."
