With the 2024-25 Sixers season officially in the rearview mirror, the time has come to evaluate the few highs and many lows of a disastrous campaign in which the team only managed 24 wins. We will do so in "Sixers year-in-review," a series assessing each individual Sixers player's performance this year based on numbers, film and quotes, while also looking ahead to the future.
Up next: Tyrese Maxey.
In the first season of a five-year max contract worth over $200 million, Maxey was slated to make another leap in his fifth NBA season. But with his two co-stars out of the lineup or ineffective for much of the season, the 24-year-old experienced consistent losing for the first time in his basketball life.
What stood out about Maxey's disappointing campaign, and what does he need to do to get back on track?
SIXERS YEAR-IN-REVIEW
Joel Embiid | Guerschon Yabusele | Jared McCain
What we learned in 2024-25
Maxey cannot quite carry the sort of load that head coach Nick Nurse has often encouraged him to seek out.
The first few weeks of this season were tremendously hard on Maxey, who without Joel Embiid and Paul George was being asked to handle a more significant offensive workload than any player in the NBA. That tall ask coincided with some brutal shooting luck — even when acknowledging the inevitable dip in efficiency that often comes with an uptick in volume — and then Maxey missed time himself with a hamstring injury. All of it took a toll on Maxey, a maniacal competitor who had never played on a losing team at any level of basketball before this season and suddenly found himself as the face of a massively underwhelming unit.
Maybe it is not just about the strategy but also the concept of empowering talented players, but Nurse has been imploring Maxey to be more aggressive hunting his own shots since the moment he took over as the Sixers' coach. It does not matter where Maxey is on the floor, what the score is, who else is on the floor or how Maxey has performed during that game — Nurse wants him to be aggressive on every single possession. With few sources of offense available early in the season, Nurse ended up providing Maxey with a workload only rivaled in recent years by players like James Harden and Luka Dončić.
It was not a coincidence that Maxey's efficiency marks finally began climbing when George and Embiid returned to the floor — not because those players were so terrific themselves, but because Maxey could just take a breather and have a bit less focus on himself. His usage early in the season was obviously unsustainable, but even that word implies a short-term benefit, and this arrangement was not productive in the short-term.
Maxey has tremendous endurance and his competitive nature will never allow him to feel like he needs that breather. Even if Maxey cannot pace himself, the Sixers must make sure they are pacing him appropriately, not just for his sake but for the sake of the team.
Number to know
Maxey averaged 1.8 steals per game in 2024-25 (previous career-best: 1.0).
Maxey's offensive output in 2024-25 was quite disappointing, but he made a massive leap on the defensive end of the floor that will make life easier for the Sixers moving forward. Maxey was a weak link for three-plus years; only later on in 2023-24 did he start to look like someone who could be relied on for consistently competent production on that end of the floor. Maxey had never forced many turnovers or been a one-on-one stopper, but his athleticism, effort and feel enabled him to get by as a defender.
Then 2024-25 came, and suddenly Maxey was performing like a clear positive-impact defender. He will never be an on-ball ace, but he was able to stand out with terrific playmaking. Maxey utilized his length, athleticism and impressive instincts to find avenues to poke the ball away or intercept passes. Nurse's staff tried to engineer situations in which the ball was funneled in Maxey's direction to enable his gambles, and they often paid off.
"I would say that the thing that really encouraged me is his progress on defense," Sixers President of Basketball Operations Daryl Morey said at his exit interview with Nurse on Sunday. "I know Coach challenged him on that end and I think he really improved in that area, and it gave me a lot of confidence that he can keep improving on that side of the ball."
MORE: Sixers mock draft roundup 1.0
Important film
Perhaps the greatest hope for Maxey heading into 2024-25 was that he would finally take the big step as a "pure point guard," leveraging his skills as a scorer to create opportunities for his teammates to score. But there were only a few flashes of it during this season, in part because Maxey rarely had a strong cast of offensive talents on the floor surrounding him. Perhaps the best game Maxey played all year came on Christmas Day, when he posted 30 points and 12 assists to lead the Sixers to a road victory over the Boston Celtics:
In his first 15 games of 2024-25, Tyrese Maxey averaged 4.6 assists per game. In seven games since, he's up to 7.1 per game, including 12 to go with 33 points for the Sixers today.
Maxey's assists vs. Celtics by recipient:
Embiid: 4
George: 2
C. Martin: 2
Yabusele: 2
Lowry: 2 pic.twitter.com/EMisODf68g— Adam Aaronson's clips (@SixersAdamClips) December 26, 2024
Perhaps Maxey was set up to fail in terms of passing development this season, but we now have a four-year sample size of him as a lead guard and the results as a playmaker for others have never been that encouraging. One of the more common criticisms of Maxey is that he is not a natural facilitator, and it is a fair claim to make. While games like the one in Boston presented a vision of what it could look like, the Sixers are running out of time to bank on Maxey to make a major leap on that front. At some point, he is what he is as a creator for others — fine, but nothing to write home about.
MORE: Which Sixers midseason additions will return?
Salient soundbite
Andre Drummond on Tyrese Maxey's growth since Maxey's second NBA season when Drummond spent part of the year with the Sixers in his exit interview on Sunday:
"The evolution of Tyrese Maxey has been amazing to watch. His confidence, the way that he plays, just the chip on his shoulder that he plays with on a nightly basis and his want to be a leader. I think he started figuring it out, every time I've seen seen him from years ago to being back here, his leadership qualities have grown."
Question heading into the future
Can Maxey become less reliant on Embiid to be effective offensively?
Maxey's impact on winning is not singularly tied to Embiid, but the numbers over his career would suggest that sharing the floor with the former NBA MVP is what enabled Maxey's rise from a talented scorer to a dominant, efficient one at all three levels. Without Embiid he is still very good, but the quality of looks is understandably far worse and in turn so are his efficiency numbers.
It would be unreasonable to expect Maxey to be just as good when there are not 10 eyes focused on Embiid, but his performance early in the season in particular was just not good enough to keep the Sixers afloat — and now that we have the knowledge that George's scoring upside may be extremely limited on a permanent basis, it will only be more important that Maxey is capable of engineering quality offense.
Contract information
Maxey has four seasons left on his five-year, $203 million contract. The entirety of the deal is guaranteed and he would become an unrestricted free agent in 2029 if he does not sign an extension before his current deal expires:
• 2025-26: $37.9 million
• 2026-27: $40.7 million
• 2027-28: $43.5 million
• 2028-29: $46.3 million
MORE: Maxey's exit interview
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