Give Tyrese Maxey a (fast)break, the Philadelphia 76ers

The Philadelphia 76ers are slow.

Mind you, that isn’t an opinion or even observation based on the good old-fashioned eye test; it’s an empirical fact based on the NBA’s pace stat.

In 2020-21, the Sixers ran at a pace of 99.5, which ranked 11th association-wide. Sure, the team still relied heavily on a half-court heavy offensive identity, with Joel Embiid accounting for the highest individual points share of any player on the team, but they moved the ball quickly, especially with “The Process” off the court, and had a lethal fast-break game engineered by Ben Simmons that ranked third in points scored league-wide.

But now? Now, the Sixers rank 26th in pace behind every team save the Dallas Mavericks, the Toronto Raptors, the Miami Heat, and the New York Knicks. and their fast-break offense has suffered too, with the team only scoring an average of 12.4 points for the 14th highest mark in the association.

Don’t get me wrong, the Philadelphia 76ers are a good team; they’re 10 games above .500 and are two games out of first place in the East despite being down one of their two-best starters, but to truly elevate their offensive game and score more than 113.6 points per game, Doc Rivers and company need to embrace pace, especially when Joel Embiid is off the court.

Let Tyrese Maxey sprint with the second team, the Philadelphia 76ers.

Tyrese Maxey and Joel Embiid are rapidly developing their two-man offensive game.

While the duo may never run the same sort of two-man action Embiid enjoyed playing alongside J.J. Redick back in the day, a goal the five-time All-Star stated during a recent media availability session, they’re working together better, moving the ball better, and facilitating each other’s offense where their cohesion was more peanut butter and blu cheese than peanut butter and jelly.

Now, roughly halfway through the 2021-22 NBA season, Maxey and Embiid rank first and second in assists, passes, and assist rate on the team and have become the team’s two primary offensive facilitators.

That’s the good news. The bad? Maxey and Embiid are playing roughly 27.9 minutes on the court together in any given game, which accounts for 78.8 and 84.8 percent of their respective on-court minutes.

Why, you may ask, is that bad news? Well, allow me to elaborate. The two-man lineup of Maxey and Embiid has a pace rating of 96.09, which is basically the exact same rating as their overall average rating, and, again, is very slow. When Maxey is on the court with any other center, be it Andre Drummond, Charles Bassey, or Paul Reed, the team’s average pace rating jumps up to 98.46, which, *spoiler alert* is much faster.

How fast? Well, if the Sixers simply ran a unit for an entire game, it would rank 14th overall between the Orlando Magic and the Chicago Bulls.

If the team had a more athletic backup five than Drummond or allowed Reed to get some run on a secondary unit at the five, the Sixers could supercharge their non-Embiid minutes with a speedy attack centered around their second-year point guard. Even if they didn’t, Drummond has been willing to run a faster offense than the methodical pace Embiid liked to use when breaking down the army of defenders he has to contest with on any given possession, so assembling a second unit of complementary players, with Matisse Thybulle, Isaiah Joe, and Reed all feeling like logical partners in crime.

But why, you may ask, would such a second unit help the Sixers? Well, because pace is sort of like a good vertical passing offense in the NFL, when a team scores points in transition, either via a steal, or a defensive rebound, it puts points on the board quickly and disrupts an opposing team’s ability to set their defense. It can force an opposing head coach to call a timeout, gas other players, and just generally put the momentum in the faster team’s court, if you will.

If Embiid’s methodical approach is about testing the minds and mettle of an opposing team, attacking the basket with a speedy set headlined by Maxey when he’s off the court could go a long way in breaking an opposing team’s spirit while putting a few more points on the board for good measure.

Joel Embiid has played in 20-straight games for the Philadelphia 76ers, which is the second-longest ironman streak of his career. But if you can, remember back to November, when Embiid was out on the COVID list, and Tyrese Maxey was tasked with running the show as a headliner. While the bones of that particular team were largely the same as this current one, they played a looser, faster style of offense. While fully embracing this brand of basketball doesn’t make sense for the Sixers as a whole, as their success lives and dies on the play of “The Process,” giving Maxey more freedom to go fast when he isn’t playmaking for Embiid could put a few more points on the board, and give the team a more balanced overall offensive attack.