It was a rough opening night for Tyrese Maxey. While it’s a new season, the game had a familiar feel from how the team looked last season without Joel Embiid.
One percent better every day has been Tyrese Maxey’s motto his entire career. At every exit interview or post-playoff exit elimination press conference, Maxey’s mantra is that he wasn’t good enough, and that he needs to get 1% better every day.
While he didn’t use those exact words, that was the theme for Maxey after the Sixers’ 124-107 loss to the Milwaukee Bucks on opening night.
While Maxey led the Sixers minus Joel Embiid and Paul George in scoring for the night with 25 points, he wasn’t able to do so with any sort of efficiency. He shot a whopping 10-for-31 from the field and just 2-of-9 from three-point range.
On top of struggling to hit shots consistently, Maxey had some timely misses that squashed any hope of going on a run to make the game competitive. He got blocked at the rim by Brook Lopez, something he admitted he did way too much of, that stopped a Sixers’ run in the third, he also missed a three in the fourth that ended a run that saw them cut the lead to 14.
Maxey didn’t seem all that concerned with one off shooting night. He didn’t feel like he was pressing, but still felt like he was trying to do too much.
“I’d say it’s more being extremely aggressive, I’d agree with that. I feel like I played a little bit too fast,” he said after the game.
He explained that on top of missing shots he normally makes, he was trying to blow by straight to the rim as opposed trying to methodically beat Milwaukee’s coverages.
“I can live with that, I know that will happen less than often, because of the work,” he said after the loss.
Maxey’s overall body of work backs that all up. This was one off night for him, one that wouldn’t even look like an off-night if a couple shots didn’t rim out and he got a couple more foul calls.
Still, Wednesday night was an all too familiar sight for both Maxey and the team’s performance, specifically on nights without Joel Embiid in the lineup.
This season’s opener might have been a rerun of any game from last season post-January. The only Sixers who could create anything off the dribble were Maxey and Kelly Oubre Jr., and neither of them possess the playmaking ability yet to sustainably create quality shots for their teammates as well as themselves. They certainly can’t against a defense as big as Milwaukee’s.
The Sixers are wise to prioritize the health of Embiid and George throughout the regular season, but they’ll have a very hard time getting through the regular season playing like the team that went 11-18 after Embiid’s knee injury in Golden State last January.
Maxey has played enough games with Embiid sidelined to no longer use that as an excuse.
“I’m not about to sit here and say that just because Jo was out we played bad,” he said. “We’ve been without Jo all preseason, all training camp, for the most part.”
He knows that this team needs to find other ways to win as well, explaining as much in maybe the most frustrated he’d had ever been as a Sixer in a postgame press conference.
“Us winning cannot solely be on Joel Embiid, it just can’t,” he said, “there’s no championship team that’s solely like [that].”
Obviously, the injury of George has complicated things. While the team may have been banking on nights where only two of the three stars are available, going down to one right as the season got underway threw a wrench into things.
Still, it seems that the team will be almost as cautious with his availability as they will with Embiid’s. That gives the Sixers another big choice for the regular season: stagger Embiid and George’s rest days, or play them together to build up their chemistry.
Of course if they go with the second option, that would still leave plenty of games where Maxey is left with quite a heavy offensive burden. It’s a tricky situation, certainly one without a clear right answer.
What is clear, though, is that if Maxey is asked to do it all like he was last year, the Sixers will once again be fighting to stay out of the Play-in tournament.