How Good of a Floor-Raiser is Tyrese Maxey?
With Paul George suspended and Joel Embiid only sporadically available in recent weeks, MOC looks at how the Sixers have fared with Maxey as the lone star.
One of the biggest themes of this Sixers season has been the process for us as fans of psychologically adjusting our expectations from where they have been over the past several years. While it was tempting early on to view last year as a total fluke and see this year as a return to the perennial fringe contender status that the Sixers have occupied for nearly a decade, that simply is not the reality. As Beckett points out, this Sixers team is merely pretty good.
And within that psychological adjustment, one of the things that fans have had to get used to is that there is no longer a player on the team at the caliber of prime Joel Embiid. Tyrese Maxey is not Joel Embiid. VJ Edgecombe will probably be pretty awesome, but he will never be as good as Joel Embiid. Even the man himself – 2026 Embiid – is not particularly close to prime Embiid, especially on the defensive end, even if he’s closer to his prime self than we all had expected before this season. We very well may go the rest of our lifetimes without seeing another Sixer as good as prime Joel.
If you scroll through social media after any given Sixers loss, one thing you will see is a lot of consternation about the fact that Maxey simply cannot carry the Embiid and PG-less roster to a higher level of success. That noise has become especially loud as the Sixers’ performance without their two max stars has worsened over the course of the year — after winning their first couple games without Maxey’s co-stars, the Sixers are now 6-12 on the year in games that Maxey plays and Embiid and George both sit. Maxey’s scoring volume and efficiency have also tailed off over the course of the year, leaving many arguing that his torrid scoring pace to start the year was somewhat fluky.
Still, whenever I see people being overly critical of Maxey for that record, I want to remind them of how and why they are actually losing those games.
On the season, the Sixers have an acceptable net rating of +0.3 when Maxey is on the floor without George and Embiid. He is not lighting the world on fire, he is not carrying terrible lineups to crazy on/off splits like prime Embiid could — and yes, it certainly says something about his status as a player that we have basically seen two calendar years of Maxey playing without Embiid, and the results are conclusive that he cannot carry a high-level team by himself.
With that being said, the real problem is what happens in the (often very few!) minutes when Maxey sits. With all three of George, Embiid, and Maxey off the floor, the Sixers have a horrendous net rating of -18.7. In other words: most of these games involve Maxey keeping the Sixers roughly even for 40-42 minutes, and the Sixers getting obliterated in the 6-8 minutes that he sits. If they could even approach competency without their Big 3 on the floor, odds are that we’d be spending a lot less time talking about Maxey’s limitations as the lead guy. Frankly, the fact that he can carry a team to an even score for 40 minutes a night with $110 million sitting on the bench is a pretty impressive feat.
What’s more, the numbers this year also show that Maxey has been a far better solo act than Embiid – the Sixers are -14.3 points per 100 possessions in lineups with Embiid on the floor and without George and Maxey. In other words, Maxey without Embiid lineups have been far, far better than Embiid without Maxey lineups. Ironically, George has been the best one-man band of them all, carrying lineups to a +8.3 net rating when Maxey and Embiid sit — a lot of that likely has to do with small sample size (301 total possessions, per Cleaning The Glass).
And, importantly, while the net rating stats certainly illustrate my point, it bears mentioning that you can feel Maxey’s impact just by watching. Anyone following this team on a nightly basis who thinks they would be remotely competitive without Maxey is simply out of their mind. I’d be stunned if they were sitting on 20 wins right now if Maxey had missed the entire year.
Again, I am not making this defense of Maxey to say that the team without George and Embiid is actually awesome and that everyone needs to back off criticizing Maxey. His inability to create for others offensively and be a transformative defensive force will prevent him from ever reaching top-five player status, barring yet another shocking leap in his mid-late 20s.
Rather, I am making the case that the real problem is the lack of depth behind them, and that Maxey’s performance as a solo act is roughly what you would expect from a top-15ish player. If Maxey and Donovan Mitchell switched rosters at the beginning of the year, would the two teams’ records change dramatically? I would argue that they would not.
And unfortunately, at least in the case of this year, there is not much the Sixers can do to better handle the minutes when none of their stars are on the floor. Edgecombe is not yet ready to be the sort of offensive engine that can carry those lineups. Quentin Grimes and Kelly Oubre Jr. have their own well documented quirks and inconsistencies. The backup center tandem of Adem Bona and Andre Drummond has just not been good enough. If I were the Sixers, I would try to build my star-less lineups around defense. Assuming they run back mostly the same squad next year, I’d make a run at someone like Kris Dunn in free agency.
Regardless, I think a large part of the criticism Maxey faces comes largely because people had grown so used to Embiid carrying lineups for eight years that they forgot how big the difference is between a top-three player and a top-20 player. While the team isn’t winning many games with Maxey as the lone star, the massive difference between lineups with him in them and without him in them clearly show a star-level impact. We just need to cope with the fact that he is not Embiid 2.0 – and neither will be pretty much anyone else.
Mike O’Connor is the best O’Connor in basketball writing. Previously of The Athletic, you can find Mike on Twitter @MOConnor_NBA. Mike’s writing is brought to you by Body Bio, supplements based on science, focusing on your gut and brain health.