How Tyrese Maxey's Ascendance Should Change the Sixers' Long Term Plans

MOC considers the Sixers' options under their new circumstances.

The most important question that every serious NBA team needs to answer for themselves is the following: when are you trying to win? Now? In two years? In seven years?

It’s the question that the Sixers couldn’t answer from the post-Iverson, pre-process days. There was no hope of winning then, and no plan for winning later. It’s the question they tried to answer by trading Jrue Holiday and entering into a deep rebuild in 2013. Julius Erving, back in 2015, claimed he was told at the time by Sixers’ ownership that The Process was a seven year plan. And, remarkably, he wasn’t far off – the first year that one could argue that the Sixers legitimately could have won the title was 2018-19, six seasons after the Holiday trade.

Surely, when the Sixers signed Paul George and extended Joel Embiid in the summer of 2024, the plan was to win now. But things have changed dramatically since then – Embiid has been constantly injured and has considerably declined, as has George, to a lesser extent on both accounts. The team has also nailed two consecutive first round draft picks in Jared McCain and V.J. Edgecombe, who each have the potential to be franchise cornerstones in the future. They stole Quentin Grimes from the Mavericks. They’ve also made a few excellent fringe signings of young players, including Dominick Barlow, Justin Edwards and Trendon Watford.

But perhaps the biggest change of all is the ascendance of Tyrese Maxey. Coming into last season, almost no one would have had Maxey as a top-15 player. Now, he might just have the inside track at a spot on First Team All-NBA. His stats are outpacing the likes of Donovan Mitchell, Jalen Brunson, and Anthony Edwards. Statistically and stylistically, he looks quite similar to peak Damian Lillard. Here are Maxey’s stats this year compared to Dame’s in 2022-23 – likely the best of Lillard’s career.

So, if you’d been told 14 months ago that George and Embiid would soon become shells of their former selves, the logical conclusion would have been for the Sixers to accept their fate and enter into another rebuild. But now, after the ascendance of Maxey and the acquisition of other young talent, the question becomes far more complicated.

They have a legitimate top-12 player at age 25, with enough of a supporting cast and pool of assets that you’d have to wonder what it’d look like to try to win now – or at least within the next few years. It’s also worth noting that the league is in a different place than past eras, where depth and identity matters more than ever. We live in a world where Tyrese Haliburton just led a team to the Finals – it’s not Steph and/or K.D. versus LeBron for the title every year where, if you don’t have one of those guys, you shouldn’t even bother trying.

Here in this piece, I’ll go through a few different possibilities for how the Sixers can proceed with building around Maxey. For clarity sake, I’m going in order of what I think is most likely for the Sixers to do.

Stay the course this season while planning to open up flexibility in the off-season

I view the most likely outcome here being that the Sixers will keep both George and Embiid on the roster this season, and simply hope that they are able to stay healthy for the playoffs. I don’t think that Daryl Morey would be all that enthused about the idea of giving up one or multiple draft picks to get off of Embiid (which is undoubtedly what it would take), in order to take back another player on a huge contract that is less talented than Embiid.

An example of a move like that would be something in the realm of Embiid and 2-3 first round picks for a player like Domantas Sabonis. Would it make the Sixers better this season? Yes. Would it give them more of a concrete identity? Yes. But at the end of the day, you are giving up draft picks in a deal that locks you into your current core and doesn’t get you into the inner circle of contenders. Your short-term title odds, while higher, are still capped pretty low, your pool of blue-chip assets is diminished, and you’ve opened up no long-term flexibility.

Instead, if Embiid continues to miss tons of games and the team misses the playoffs or loses in the first round, I could foresee a scenario this summer in which they salary dump George and waive and stretch Embiid in order to open up cap space to go out and sign free agents. If they were able to fully dump George (possible, but unlikely) and then stretch Embiid’s contract, they could have up to $70 million in cap space heading into the summer. A much more likely scenario would be taking back a smaller contract for George – let’s say, Jerami Grant’s $35 million deal – in some sort of three team deal that opens up $35 million in cap space, when combined with stretching Embiid.

In that event, you’ve just reshuffled the deck without giving up any major draft assets. Embiid and George are gone, and they’d go into 2026-27 with their current core of young players, Grant, and the ability to add $35 million in free agents. That’s not a bad spot to be in!

This path, despite not being the most expedient, does re-align the Sixers’ timeline around Maxey without completely mortgaging their long term future. Getting to title contention from here would still be a delicate task, but in freeing themselves from the George and Embiid contracts, it gives them enough flexibility to get there if they can nail a couple big decisions. And, most importantly, by not trading any of their future draft picks, they have all the freedom in the world to lengthen their timeline if their attempts to win in the short term wind up failing.

Keep George and Embiid on the roster while hoping to string together small wins for 3-4 years

In the event that Morey refuses to give up draft assets to get off of George and/or Embiid, and Josh Harris refuses to eat the money required to stretch one of both of them, the Sixers would of course be stuck with both aging stars through the 2028 and 2029 seasons, respectively.

Needless to say, I find this to be the most difficult path imaginable for building a title contender around Maxey. That is in large part because of the fact that once Embiid’s deal expires in 2029, the Sixers will then be on the hook for extensions for both Maxey and Edgecombe. McCain, if he’s still around, would have kicked in a year earlier.

Maxey, barring consecutive years of injury and/or regression, should make an All-NBA team at some point, and thus, be in line for a super-max deal. Edgecombe, if he becomes the player we all expect him to be, would be in line for a regular max deal. There goes 60 percent of the salary cap right there, just with those two guys.

This scenario would hopefully involve quality draft picks coming in from the Clippers in 2028 and 2029, but those are obviously far from guaranteed hits. Filling out the rest of the roster with 40 percent of the cap would be an incredibly difficult task, unless Maxey and Edgecombe are both top-15 players at that point.

I’m not discounting the possibility that they could string together some helpful moves and successful draft picks over the next four years, but they would realistically have to pull off 2-3 more Quentin Grimes-esque trades and 1-2 more Jared McCain-level draft steals in order to be title contenders in the 2029-30 season. It’s just that hard to build contenders around two max players in the second apron era. There is a reason that contending teams in recent years – the Celtics, Pacers, Thunder, and Nuggets — all made it to the Finals before their best player was on a supermax. Depth matters more than ever. Once you have to start shedding salary to pay your top guy $60 million, it’s practically impossible to have sustained title contention.

In the past, this is sort of the path that Daryl Morey has chosen to take – he doesn’t like to give up picks to undo bad contracts, and he rarely bottoms out to set himself up for the future. When Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming started losing their careers due to injury in the late 2000s, Morey never decided to tank, opting instead to string together a bunch of small victories before eventually trading for James Harden.

That might be the path he chooses here, but the landscape of the league in the second apron era makes things far more difficult. You run the risk of ending up like Lillard’s Blazers – they made one fluky Conference Finals appearance, and once that supermax contract kicked in, it was simply impossible to build a winning team around him.

In summary: waiting out the Embiid and George contracts makes winning with Maxey an awful lot harder. You are basically punting on the best years of his prime and hoping that you’ll be able to win when his contract takes up 35 percent of the cap. It’s a huge, long gamble that depends entirely on them stringing along high-quality wins on the margins for multiple consecutive years – either that, or a prayer that Embiid and George will find new life in their mid-late thirties to help Maxey make deep playoff runs.

Five Thoughts on the Sixers' First 16 Games

Trade Embiid at the deadline in a win-now move; worry about George later

This path would certainly end up being the most satisfying choice in the short term. I mentioned the possibility of trading for Domantas Sabonis earlier – even though he is nowhere near the player that prime Embiid was, he is extremely durable, he fits their current identity, and he would likely make their supporting cast good enough to give Maxey a shot to carry them to a Conference Finals appearance. You can sub out McCain for two more first-round picks here, if you like.

Sabonis is far from the only option. There figures to be a plethora of max contract players available on the trade market this year – Zach LaVine, Zion Williamson, Anthony Davis, Giannis, etc. I’m not expecting the Sixers to trade Embiid for one of those guys, but could they hop into a trade as a third team in order to dump his deal? Or, could they pluck at the remnants of one of those teams after they trade their star? Would the Bucks accept Embiid and the Clippers pick for Myles Turner and Kyle Kuzma? It’s yucky, I know, but if you’d like to get off Embiid, you’re going to have to give something up and take something not-so-great back.

Splitting Embiid into multiple bad-ish contracts is likely the best option for getting off of him in the short term. Some of these may hurt your soul, but we’ve got to be realistic about where Embiid’s value is.

The Brooklyn Nets are perhaps the most logical partner for that type of a trade. They are in the midst of a deep rebuild and have plenty of room on their books to take on Embiid’s contract, and they also have multiple overpaid but competent role players whose salary adds up neatly to Embiid’s. Again – this would suck. But barring a miraculous turnaround for Embiid’s health, it would help the Sixers both short and long term.

Here’s a bit of a crazy one, which probably carries the most value in terms of winning now: would it be worth giving the Clippers their picks back if they swap Embiid for Kawhi Leonard? Leonard has just two years left on his deal, and his familiarity with Nick Nurse and Paul George might be attractive to him. Let me know which team says no to this three-teamer.

As much as all of these trades would hurt, they more than likely give the Sixers a better chance of winning now, while also clearing their books down the line. They would retain most of their picks while still putting themselves in a position to have cap space in 2028 before Maxey, McCain and Edgecombe’s extensions kick in.

As for the ceiling of any iterations of these teams, I’d say the Kawhi trade and the Sabonis trade both would give this team an outside chance at winning the East – with the former depending largely on health.

If they do decide to cut bait with Embiid in an effort to win now, keeping George around for the short term makes the most sense. He fits with any iteration of this roster, and he isn’t netting much positive value, if any, in a trade. It likely becomes much easier for the Sixers to get off of his deal in a year or two, if they so choose.

In any event, trading Embiid for another distressed asset may very well be the best option out of any of these three paths. Are you winning the title with a Maxey-Sabonis-George trio? Probably not. But it raises their chances while cutting out the long-term downside of Embiid’s deal. Would Kawhi be a nightmare to deal with, in many similar ways to Embiid? Yes, but he’s a better player right now, and his contract expires after next season. Are Claxton and MPJ getting this team beyond the No. 4 seed? I doubt it. But they’d be available often enough, with enough competence to give Maxey a shot at a carry job.

The other option, which would likely come with the highest premium, would involve basically punting on this season in order to trade Embiid and George to a tanking team with expiring contracts, like the Washington Wizards. As much as this trade would suck, it would open up $70-plus million in cap space, as I outlined earlier, thus allowing them to clear the books and build fresh around Maxey and Edgecombe.

I know – all of these trades suck. But this would set them up to wipe away all their mistakes from the summer of 2024 and start fresh. The ability to potentially add two max-level players to Maxey and Edgecombe is pretty enticing to think about.

Overall, I think a Sabonis-type trade is the most likely out of all of these. I don’t think the Sixers have an appetite for another mini-rebuild. And as I mentioned above, the most likely path out of all is that they play things out for this season and re-evaluate in the off-season. If things continue along the current trend with Embiid, I would be stunned if he’s still on the team in 14 months. It is too much of a distraction, and his current level of play does not warrant the drama that he comes with. I’d have to think the team would entertain ways to get off of him and start to build completely around Maxey.

None of these trades – hell, none of these three paths – make me feel great inside. It’s going to take a lot of foresight and lots of small wins by Daryl Morey and co. to turn the Sixers into a title contender built around Maxey. But the one thing I now feel confident about after his start to the season is that Maxey is capable of leading a contending team. Between what we saw from the Pacers and Haliburton last spring, plus Maxey’s ascendance this year, I do think he could lead a team to The Finals, if the front office is able to pull off enough Hail Marys to give him the right supporting cast.

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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.