September 28, 2024
Sergio Estrada/Imagn Images
Can Tyrese Maxey continue to evolve after becoming an All-Star and winning the NBA's Most Improved Player Award?
Welcome to our Sixers player preview series! Between now and Sixers Media Day on Sep. 30, we will preview each one of the 14 players on the team's standard roster, posing two critical questions that will help determine their fate in 2024-25 before making a prediction about the player's season to come.
The upcoming season will be the fifth professional campaign for Tyrese Maxey, who continued his remarkable ascension with his first career All-Star nod and the NBA's Most Improved Player Award in 2023-24. Fresh off a five-year contract worth more than $200 million, what does one of the greatest draft picks in Sixers history have in store in the months to come?
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Maxey's year-to-year growth as an NBA player has been nearly unparalleled; his ability to make marked improvements in between every season of his professional career is remarkable and a testament to his outstanding skill and work ethic.
A blend of electrifying speed and terrific shot-making have turned Maxey into a player who is nearly impossible to stop as a scorer. He can get to the rim at will because of his blazing first step, knows how to initiate contact and get to the line, is one of the best and most versatile three-point shooters in the league and has shown the ability to thrive in the in-between game (though a recent reluctance to attempt floaters and occasional mid-range jumpers has been a bit problematic for Maxey).
The more pressing issue now is whether or not the Sixers' All-Star point guard can maximize his ability to leverage the threat of his scoring to create optimal shots for his teammates. He averaged 6.2 assists per game in 2023-24, a career-best, but it felt as if he was just scratching the surface of what he can become as a passer and playmaker. Sixers head coach Nick Nurse spent much of the first few months of the season focused on Maxey's development as a creator for others and saw some tangible progress as the season went on.
Still, though, the Sixers are a team that, on paper, lacks high-level passing. Joel Embiid is their only starter who is an above-average passer relative to their position, and their bench does not have a ton of plus passers either. Maxey is going to have a basketball in his hands more often than any other Sixers player in 2024-25. He does not have to develop the court vision of LeBron James or Nikola Jokić, but if he can become a clearly above-average creator for others, it would go a long way towards the Sixers becoming an adequate passing unit.
One of the more interesting — even if underlying — storylines of Maxey's fourth NBA campaign was his improvement on the defensive end of the floor in the final months of the season. Maxey's physical limitations will always cap his value and versatility as a defender, but he has a motor that never stops and just enough size to get by.
There are a few ways that Maxey's continued improvement — or lack thereof — could theoretically be measured once the season starts. Even as Maxey made a mini-leap on that end of the floor later on last season, his steal rates largely stayed the same. Maxey has not typically been a massive risk-taker in terms of forcing turnovers as a defender, but Nurse has often encouraged such behavior in hopes of winning the possession battle — a concept he has long stressed the importance of, even predating his time in Philadelphia.
But, truthfully, it might not be possible to judge Maxey's defense based on his steals or any other statistics. It is going to take watching Maxey on a game-by-game basis, seeing how teams attack him and how he responds in all sorts of situations. Because — trust me on this one — teams are going to attack Maxey as a defender early and often next season.
Even during a stage of his career in which he might take more plays off on the defensive end of the floor than he used to, Paul George's reputation as a wing stopper is established. Caleb Martin's hard-nosed mentality is revered, and Kelly Oubre Jr. became an excellent defensive player across multiple positions last season. Going at Maxey will be the obvious path of least resistance for most teams; even if he improves as a defender he will be the weakest link within the Sixers' projected starting five.
The real test will be how Maxey holds up at the ends of games when teams hunt him on switches over and over — and the Sixers' level of trust in him in those situations will become evident in how Nurse and his staff counter from a schematic perspective.
Maxey makes noticeable improvements as a passer, but is not an elite playmaker. His defensive performance resembles that of the last few months of the 2023-24 season. He earns his second consecutive All-Star Game appearance, solidifying himself as one of the league's best guards.
Last season, the Sixers needed every bit of Maxey's outrageous scoring ability to navigate many games with Embiid unavailable and a roster suffering from the loss of James Harden without any shot creators joining the team in his absence. His decent improvements as a playmaker were very helpful, to be sure, but nearly all of the focus was on how frequently and efficiently he could put the ball in the basket. He passed those tests with flying colors.
The Sixers expect Embiid to play more than 46 games between the regular season and postseason in 2024-25. They have added a nine-time All-Star in George who averages well over 20 points per game every year. Suddenly, Maxey's brilliance as a scorer might not be something that the Sixers need to utilize every single time he takes the floor. But for his scoring burden to be lowered, Embiid and George need to consistently have the ball in the right spots to succeed, and Maxey must lead the charge in taking command of his team's offense to ensure that happens.
The natural skeptic in me is inclined to not buy Maxey making significant strides as a passer or his strong close to last season as a defender very much. The sample sizes are small and they go against typical trends in player development. But Maxey is not a typical player or worker, and going against the norm in terms of player development has become the norm for the 23-year-old star. I will simply never bet against Tyrese Maxey.
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