The 2024-25 Sixers will begin training camp on Oct. 1 in the Bahamas.
As that date approaches, we’ll dive into several significant topics for the team in Nick Nurse’s second season as head coach.
We’ve looked so far at:
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- What the Sixers will be able to depend on this season
- Whether the team has done enough to address its defensive rebounding problem
- How much Nurse will lean on his older players
Next up: In what ways can Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey improve?
Any critiques of Embiid’s play last regular season are essentially nitpicking.
Before being sidelined for a little over two months with a left lateral meniscus injury, Embiid made 34 appearances and the Sixers went 26-8 in those games. He averaged 34.0 minutes and posted 35.3 points, 11.3 rebounds, 5.7 assists, 1.8 blocks and 1.1 steals per contest.
NBA
Fresh off signing another contract extension, Embiid doesn’t view himself as a finished product. As always, he’ll aim to become a better passer. He showed progress in his first season with Nurse — cannily anticipating where and when double teams would arrive; spotting open teammates on his drives; making the occasional highlight dish in transition. Embiid’s 0.81 assist-to-usage ratio was the highest of his career, according to Cleaning the Glass.
Embiid had important decision-making lapses, though. He committed nine turnovers in Game 5 of the Sixers’ first-round playoff series last year vs. the Knicks and five in Game 6. Some of those giveaways were fine for a high-usage player facing constant pressure — borderline offensive foul calls, marginally off-target feeds out of double teams, etc.
However, other Embiid turnovers were too sloppy for the circumstances. He’s capable of cutting down a bit on skip passes into the stands and ambitious flings up the floor.
It sounds silly for such a tremendous scorer, but we also think Embiid should be able to generate slightly “easier” points.
Of course, he’s elite at sinking mid-range jumpers and feasts at the foul line. Embiid led the NBA last year with 4.2 attempts per game between 15 and 19 feet, and he drilled a stellar 53.9 percent of those shots. More points around the hoop and early in the shot clock would still be great.
In the Sixers-Knicks series, only 15.9 percent of Embiid’s field goal attempts were “very early” or “early” in the shot clock (24 to 15 seconds remaining). Nurse wants him to be active on the offensive glass and capitalize on chances to attack before the defense is set.
Clearly, availability comes first for Embiid. Degrees of health matter, too. While he’s usually still very valuable when playing through injury, he’s less likely to beat his man up the floor, jostle for offensive rebounds and avoid serious fatigue in the closing minutes.
Much of his extensive playoff injury history can be chalked up to horrible luck, but Embiid and the Sixers need to be prudent about controlling everything possible with his health. He admitted last season that he’d been well below his best physically prior to the Jan. 30 play where the Warriors' Jonathan Kuminga fell on his left knee.
“It wasn’t about those last couple games,” Embiid said on Feb. 29. “It was the same thing that was happening a couple weeks before where I just felt like I wasn’t myself, but I was still good enough to go out there because I know that 60 or 70 percent of me can still help the team a lot on both ends of the floor. At the time, we had just lost two, three games in a row and guys were going down.
“Like I said, my mindset is to play, so I’ve got to do whatever it takes to help the team. Sometimes it helps me, sometimes it doesn’t. … There’s nothing different I would’ve done.”
Embiid’s Most Improved Player teammate plans to keep on growing his game.
For Maxey, mid-range shooting remains an emphasis. Though he’s undoubtedly able to drain difficult jumpers in clutch situations, Maxey shot 38.5 percent on two-pointers not at the rim last season, according to Cleaning the Glass.
“Sometimes, when you get in the playoffs, you have to make a shot,” Maxey said in July. “At the end of the day, basketball is about scoring a basket and being able to sometimes make tough shots. And I think those are just shots you need to add to your game — to my game for sure.
“And just getting stronger. I feel like that was one of the biggest things. We have a lot of guys on our team right now that are switchable. I don’t want to be a guy that’s showing (on ball screens); I want to switch as well. I think that’ll make Coach Nurse’s job a little easier as well.”
At 23 years old, Maxey obviously hasn’t seen it all in the NBA.
As the Sixers’ top star during Embiid’s absence last year, opponents threw a variety of aggressive defenses at him.
“It would be easy if they ran just normal NBA man (defense),” Maxey said after a Jan. 6 loss to the Jazz. “But they were in some box-and-ones. They denied me up the court sometimes. So once I got the ball, then it was kind of hard to see. Now they’re in a box-and-one; now they’re in a 2-3 (zone). If they were in normal man, it would’ve been easier for me to put guys in the right spots.”
Even with two All-Stars next to Maxey this season in Embiid and Paul George, the Sixers will hope he can read defenses well, adapt smoothly and trust himself to orchestrate the offense.