The Sixers star guard signed a massive contract with the team last summer. He certainly didn’t have this in mind as the first season of the deal.
In a season as bad as 2024-25, it’s probably a bit of an unpopular sentiment to feel bad for anyone on the Sixers. The team deserves all the criticism they get as the negative headlines continue to pile up with the latest being that Joel Embiid will be re-evaluated in 7-10 days due to knee swelling. Calls for Embiid to be shut down for the remainder of the season will only get louder as the losses are accumulated while the team still trudges along through the January scheduling gauntlet they’re currently facing. Questions about Daryl Morey’s competency will be asked more and more given Morey had free rein to do whatever he wanted last offseason and the season has gone off the rails before it could ever get on the rails.
Having said all of that, we should still be mindful of the human emotions that a lot of the Sixers players have experienced this year. Jared McCain’s promising rookie season came to a crashing halt due to a meniscus injury. Caleb Martin had to have been excited upon his arrival in Philadelphia over what appeared to be his opportunity to be a full-time starter on a team many believed would contend. However, Martin dealt with shoulder problems in the first half of the season that limited his effectiveness and availability. Kyle Lowry might be headed for retirement and I doubt the veteran thought his last season would go like this when he joined his hometown team in the middle of last season and re-signed last summer.
But I don’t think there’s any player we should feel as bad for this season as we do for Tyrese Maxey. After making his first All-Star game last season and being named the NBA’s Most Improved Player, Maxey has flatlined a bit in 2024-25. He hasn’t been bad by any means, but the next step in his career towards becoming an All-NBA player might not be happening this year either. His field goal percentage is down three points from last year and would be a career low if it stands at 42.1. His three-point percentage is also down four points from last season.
Despite some of these statistical declines, there are obvious signs in Maxey’s performance this year that suggest he’s desperately trying to turn the team’s season around, in some cases all by himself. Let’s start with the most obvious measurement of his effort. Maxey has appeared in 32 of the Sixers’ 39 games this season. Bear in mind, he missed time in November with a hamstring injury. So, save for the hamstring injury absence a couple months ago, he’s done his best to suit up just about every night. He’s only 24 so let’s not act like he even requires the same load management tactics the team has employed with Embiid and Paul George. But, in an NBA in which plenty of players are content with being spotted nights off, Maxey does not seem interested in that.
Now let’s add some proper context to the decrease in offensive efficiency for Maxey this season. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Maxey’s 21.2 field goal attempts per game and 9.5 three-point attempts per game are both career highs. He is also attempting a career high 5.9 free throws per game. All of these things are explanations for Maxey perhaps pressing a bit more than usual this season knowing that he needs to take matters into his own hands more than he’d like given the Sixers are consistently shorthanded.
There have also been positive sentiments surrounding Maxey’s defense. Prior to last season, he was probably considered an average defender at best. Defense can be tough to quantify, at least for the average fan that is fixated on the traditional stats. In its simplest form, playing good defense can be boiled down to how much effort a player is giving on that end of the floor.
There is no doubt that Maxey cares about winning basketball games which is probably what has made this season so tough for him. Given the dearth of backcourt help with McCain out for the year, he probably feels the need to take more outside shots even when Embiid and George are available. When one or both of those veterans are out, it would be only natural for Maxey to begin feeling the pressure of the max contract he just received when he is undeniably the best player on the court for the Sixers.
It’s also worth highlighting Maxey’s past to realize that this is a season unlike any other for the star guard. In his senior year of high school, Maxey was named Mr. Basketball in Texas. He was a McDonald’s All-American and recruited by John Calipari to play at the University of Kentucky. The 2019-20 college basketball season was stopped due to COVID, but prior to the season’s conclusion, Kentucky was ranked as high as No. 1 in the country in Maxey’s lone season in Lexington and finished at No. 8 in the final AP poll. Maxey made the All-SEC Freshman Team and was a second team All-SEC selection. Fortunately for the Sixers, Maxey started a little slow at Kentucky and by the time he started to gain steam, the season got shut down. In a normal college basketball season, Maxey would have played well enough for a long enough period of time to have been snatched up before the 21st pick in the 2020 draft.
Maxey didn’t play a huge role for the Sixers right out of the gate, but he was a regular bench contributor on the 2020-21 team that finished with the No. 1 seed in the East. By his second season, Maxey was a mainstay in the starting lineup on a team that had expectations of deep playoff runs yearly. While the Sixers have been unable to deliver on making a deep playoff run, and Maxey was denied the opportunity to play in the NCAA Tournament in college, he’s always been in situations where winning championships was the bar. When you consider this, it’s particularly nice that Maxey at least comes across as a kind and humble man and doesn’t appear to have much of an ego despite being in the spotlight for most of his basketball career.
“It’s definitely hard,” Maxey said after the latest loss on Wednesday to New York. “It’s definitely difficult. Like you said I’ve won on every level of my career, so I think it got to me early like early in the season.”
The daily grind of what looks like a lost season has to be hitting Maxey like a bucket of cold water. Unfortunately, this is not the GM mode of a video game where we can just simulate the rest of the season, root for as many losses in the simulation as possible, and wake up tomorrow and it is lottery day just like that. It makes sense to root for a tank at this point if you’re a fan of the team, but I don’t think these losses are hitting anyone harder than Tyrese Maxey.