How Tyrese Maxey saved the Philadelphia 76ers’ season

The Philadelphia 76ers are an above-average basketball team.

They aren’t elite, or even particularly great, but in an association where 20 of its 30 teams take part in some sort of playoff contest, the Sixers are easily a top- 6 team in the East who shouldn’t have to worry much about the play-in round.

Are there moves that could make the Sixers better? You bet. There’s that little matter of trading the team’s $177.2 million point guard who has yet to take the court this year, in addition to some moves on the margins that could provide an incremental boost, but until those deals happen, Philly will just sort of… exist.

Is it fun to watch the team you love tread water for half a season? Not particularly, but goodness, could you imagine how much worse the team would be if Tyrese Maxey didn’t magically transform from a nice young energy player to a borderline All-Star caliber point guard? Here’s how the Kentucky guard effectively saved the season.

The Philadelphia 76ers would be a whole lot worse without Tyrese Maxey.

Between you and me, I think the Philadelphia 76ers really thought they’d have Ben Simmons back in time for opening night.

Philly operated in free agency like Simmons was going to play, with Daryl Morey and company opting against signing a point guard like Patty Mills in favor of Georges Niang, Andre Drummond, and the returns of Danny Green and Furkan Korkmaz, and the team’s current pace, rebounding and assist woes can be directly attributed to losing a career 15.9-7.7-8.1 guy. Simmons’ size would help to raise the average height of one of the shortest teams in the NBA, and even with three really good defenders on the roster in Green, Joel Embiid and Matisse Thybulle, adding the potential Defensive Player of the Year certainly couldn’t hurt.

Typically, when a team loses a player like that, it’s hard to replace them without acquiring another player with a similar talent level – and believe you me, if the Sixers did add another Simmons-level talent, they would be a whole heck of a lot better – but the Sixers got lucky. They’re getting comparable stats, minus the rebounding, out of a 21-year-old guard drafted outside of the lottery.

In 2020-21, Maxey was a nice player. He averaged eight points and two assists in 61 games of action and padded out his offensive game with a little under two 3 point attempts per game, even if he made them at a 30.1 percent clip. His energy was a lot of fun, and his defense came around by season’s end, but at best, he looked like a complementary piece, not the sort of foundational piece worthy of building around per se.

Fast forward to the 2021-22 preseason, and Maxey looked a good bit better than one year prior, building on an encouraging playoff showing and a white-hot run in the Summer League, but hardly a Ja Morant-type ready to take the keys to an offense himself. He wasn’t facilitating the offense like a true point guard, and he turned the ball over seven times in three contests, which, in hindsight, is pretty interesting considering how things have shaken out.

There’s no doubt about it; the Sixers’ prospects looked bleak. Embiid would get doubled on every play, the team would struggle to get him the ball, and the season would surely end more like 2019-20 than 2020-21, let alone 2018-19.

But then something strange happened; Maxey took his game up about two-to-three notches. He averaged 14.7 points in 31.7 minutes of action a night over the month of October, and suddenly the Sixers found themselves 4-2 with a big win over Atlanta. Was Maxey perfect? No, his 3 point shooting wasn’t that much better than his rookie season averages, but he more than doubled his assists per game from 1.5 to 3.5 and looked like a much better facilitator than he showed at any point up to that point.

Okay, no big deal, right? Plenty of players have had nice runs this season only to fall back to earth, but that never really happened with Maxey. His November was even nicer than his October, and even though his December was a bit up and down thanks to the absence and then return of Embiid, he still turned on more than a few “wow” performances.

With Maxey at the controls, the Sixers have a 17-15 record and a points differential of positive three. The second-year point guard ranks third on the team in points, second in assists behind Embiid, and improbably enough, fifth on the team among qualifying players at 3 point shooting with a cool 38 percent on 3.4 attempts per game.

While melding the styles of Embiid and Maxey remains a work in progress, as the duo have only shared the court for 576 minutes and have an encouraging net rating of positive six, could you imagine how bad the Sixers would be without their second-year draftee? I mean, we’d be looking at Shake Milton at point guard, a halfcourt offense near-exclusively built around Tobias Harris and Seth Curry playing off of Embiid, and, undoubtedly, a worse basketball team.

Players don’t normally take the sort of leap that Tyrese Maxey made for Year 1 to Year 2, especially players selected in the bottom half of the first round. Sure, you’ll occasionally get a player like Desmond Bane, who takes the league by storm as a sophomore and makes many a talent evaluator punch their desk in disgust, but there are scores more who never get much better or earn an opportunity to do so. To the Philadelphia 76ers’ credit, they gave Maxey that opportunity, and he ran with it to a degree even Daryl Morey couldn’t have imagined when he called in the pick on November 18th, 2020. Without Maxey, who knows how bad the Sixers would be?