The Sixers’ 109-97 win over the Orlando Magic in the Play-In tournament to secure the seventh seed in the Eastern Conference cemented their turnaround from a disastrous 2024-25 campaign. Thanks to a 21-win increase they were able to clinch a playoff spot for the eighth time in the last nine seasons.
It’s not like the Sixers achieved this with major roster upheaval. They retained 11 players from the prior season heading into this one. Proving that the previous season was just an injury-riddled disaster
was something they all took pride in.
Head coach Nick Nurse opened the year saying there was a lot of “pissed off-ness” about how the ’24-25 season went and how motivated the organization was to erase that. He reiterated that again after the victory over Orlando.
“I said we had a really, really big hole to dig out of and we want to get in the tournament somehow” Nurse said postgame. “It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t pretty, but we’re here now and now we get to see what we can do with it.”
To Nurse’s point, it’s not like everything that went wrong a season ago suddenly clicked into place. Joel Embiid and Paul George still missed a combined 87 games this year with no guarantee Embiid will be able to suit up for the playoffs.
“It means a lot,” George said. “Last season, that was as about as tough as a season I’ve been a part of, but for us to turn it around, we dealt with some adversity this year but we got through it.”
No player took this more to heart than Tyrese Maxey. While he hasn’t quite snatched the title of most impactful star on the Sixers roster from Joel Embiid, he is definitely the most available. The fact that he’s able to suit up regularly makes him bear the brunt of the team’s on-court struggles on a day-to-day basis.
The All-NBA caliber season in which he averaged 28 points per game is nice, but proving he can lead a team through the regular season to the playoffs has been a larger goal. He made a vow to get back watching last year’s playoffs, and didn’t care for Knicks’ commentator Walt Frazier’s preseason assessment that he better get used to losing.
Driving this type of winning is so important to Maxey that he promised multiple teammates that he would lead them back to the playoffs.
“I promised Kyle [Lowry] before the season,” Maxey said. “He called me around May, I said ‘there’s just no chance that I’m gonna let you not be in the playoffs next year.’”
He also detailed how important that was for many of the younger guys who haven’t made the playoffs yet, guys like Dominick Barlow, Jabari Walker and, of course, VJ Edgecombe.
“Dalen Terry came up to me at shootaround and just said ‘please, man, just please, get me in there. I have been in the Play-In four years straight,’” Maxey explained. “I said, ‘we going to the playoffs, so don’t worry about it, D.T.’”
In his own words, coming through on this promise meant everything to Maxey.
“The way last season went, I just didn’t want to have that feeling again,” he said. “I just challenged myself last summer, and I feel like I rose to that challenge.”
Maxey’s teammates have not been shy about the vocal leader he has developed into over the past couple of seasons. If there’s one way to cement yourself as the locker room leader, it’s coming through on promises like that.
