How is Tyrese Maxey handling his heavy minutes? The Sixers star is ‘lost in the competitiveness’

When Tyrese Maxey flew down the court for his game-saving block on the Golden State Warriors’ De’Anthony Melton last week, it was not only an impressive burst of speed.

“That’s conditioning, too,” former 76ers coach Doc Rivers said while commending Maxey’s play the following day. “If you’re tired mentally or physically, you can’t make that play.”

Maxey insists that, a quarter of the way through this season, he is not fatigued. But perhaps no Sixer is savoring this light stretch in the schedule more than their star point guard.

Maxey entered Wednesday leading the NBA in minutes played, at 39.9 per game. That is more than three minutes greater than the next player with a comparable number of games logged (the Los Angeles Lakers’ Austin Reeves’ 36.8 minutes in 20 games). Maxey’s recent workloads have included playing the entire second half and overtime of a Nov. 20 win at the Milwaukee Bucks, when he scored a career-high 54 points. In a Nov. 30 double-overtime loss to the Orlando Magic, he played more minutes (52) than there are in a typical NBA game (48).

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No NBA player has averaged 40 minutes or more per game since Monta Ellis with Golden State in 2010-11 (40.3). So conventional wisdom says this pace for Maxey is not sustainable for the 82-game grind. Sixers coach Nick Nurse hopes having the team’s four rotation guards healthy — and productive — will ease Maxey’s load moving forward.

Still, it has taken impressive physical fitness and mental fortitude for Maxey to pull this off for the season’s first seven weeks while playing at an All-NBA level. He entered Wednesday ranked third in the league in scoring (31.5 points per game) and averaging a career-high 7.2 assists and 4.7 rebounds.

“He’s a warrior,” teammate Paul George said. “There’s no question about it. He’s a fighter. … [There’s] a leadership about him. And when he’s out there, I play for him. I do everything I can to make the game easier for him. He’s our guy. It’s inspiring. Me, as a vet, it’s inspiring for a guy to consistently do it — and to be efficient with all the minutes that he’s been playing.”

Nurse said Maxey’s relentless energy stems from him being “lost in the competitiveness” of the Sixers’ 13-10 start, that “it’s not like I’m sitting there saying, ‘Hey, you’ve got to come out.’ It’s the other way around. He doesn’t want to come out.” It’s also a responsibility to which Maxey has become accustomed. Last season, he led the NBA at 37.7 minutes per game in 52 games. In 2023-24, he ranked second in the league in that category, with 37.5 minutes in 70 games.

Nurse’s top players racking up heavy minutes has also become a trademark of his coaching approach. Then-Toronto Raptor Pascal Siakam led the NBA in that category for two consecutive seasons, from 2021-23, while Fred VanVleet landed in the top five in both seasons. This season, fellow Sixers Kelly Oubre Jr. (34.8 minutes) and VJ Edgecombe (34.6) rank in the top 20 in that category, although their workloads have been diminished by injuries.

Though there may not appear to be a massive difference between 37 and 40 minutes on the court, they add up game after game. Especially when Maxey is so active in generating the Sixers’ offense with the ball in his hands, and he has become more of a defensive playmaker.

“He’s taken that challenge on a nightly basis, while being guarded by the best defender, usually,” George said Wednesday. “ ... He’s doesn’t look for a night off, to go and sit in the corner and guard no one.”

The 25-year-old Maxey credits sports performance consultant Alexander Reeser with building foundational offseason strength and conditioning programs that “[push] me to my max limit, every day.” Maxey also has gained a reputation for his early morning on-court workouts, and for sometimes clocking in for as many as three sessions per day.

Last season, Maxey added, was his first time “really locking in” on recovery, an effort to blend his present high performance with career longevity. Which means his routine between games in-season has become “very minimal work, for obvious reasons,” Nurse said.

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Maxey said the goal of his individual sessions is not “running around” to get to his spots on the floor to shoot — or to execute elaborate dribble combinations — which expend more energy. Instead, he drills passing, touch layups, floaters, and jumpers from the midrange and beyond the arc.

“It’s the stuff you do after you do the move,” Maxey said. “Making sure it feels good.”

Added Nurse: “He’s maturing a little bit, to have the confidence to just understand he can roll [in games] without having to have a big day on the floor on the off days.”

Nurse has tinkered with when to rest Maxey, typically at the end of the first and/or third quarters or at the beginning of the second and/or fourth quarters. In that Nov. 20 game at Milwaukee, however, Maxey told Nurse, “Coach, let me go,” leading to him playing the final 29 minutes. Yet even within those lengthy on-court stretches, teammate Jared McCain has noticed Maxey going “straight to sit down” on the bench during timeouts.

“Give him his time to breathe and rest,” McCain said. “[It’s] definitely a responsibility … [that] all the guards take, and something we’ve got to help him with.”

The Sixers’ new-look offense, after all, has been built around its four rotation guards — Maxey, Edgecombe, McCain, and Quentin Grimes — who can score, push the pace, and pass in a variety of lineup combinations. But only recently did that full group reach full strength.

McCain got off to a rocky start after missing nearly a calendar year following knee and thumb surgeries, but now he looks like a threat to score from all three levels. Edgecombe, a hyper-athletic two-way player, missed three games with a calf injury. And, outside the backcourt, max players George and former MVP Joel Embiid remain limited after offseason knee surgeries.

“That’s kind of part of the reason we spread the floor out and we’re moving the ball a lot more,” Nurse said of those guard-heavy looks last week. “We’re trying to get them to play downhill and off the catch. We just haven’t quite got to it yet. There’s glimpses of it. …

“We’re just [spreading] them out, and they go back and forth and move the pieces a little bit and then, boom, one of them’s down the lane. I hope they make a good decision. They either take it forcibly to the rim, or they just kick it out to a shooter or start it all over again.”

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Perhaps the start of the second quarter of Sunday’s loss to the Lakers offered some encouragement, when the Sixers turned a tie game into an eight-point advantage while Maxey rested for nearly six minutes. But their latest poor third quarter followed, and then LeBron James’ shot-making buried the Sixers down the stretch.

That the vast majority of the Sixers’ games so far have been tight has also contributed to Maxey’s workload. They entered Wednesday having played the league’s third-most “clutch” games (16), which occurs when the score is within five points or less with five minutes remaining in the fourth quarter.

So when the Sixers staged a rare blowout win over the Washington Wizards last week — and Maxey logged a season-low 29 minutes — he chuckled when asked if he could immediately play another game.

“Yeah, I guess so,” he said.

Maxey followed that up by amassing 40 minutes against the Warriors and 37 at the Bucks on back-to-back nights. Then, another 39 against the Lakers.

After that game, how did Maxey plan to spend this lighter stretch in the schedule?

“Rest,” he said. “Just rest.”