How Nick Nurse Hopes to Help Ease Life for Tyrese Maxey

PHILADELPHIA — Even Nick Nurse acknowledges that Tyrese Maxey probably has too much on his plate.

"I really would like him to be super fresh to play the last eight, nine minutes of the game. A little bit more fresh than maybe he's been," Nurse told reporters ahead of Thursday's game against the Houston Rockets.

"He's doing a lot of work and he's carried a big load and he's had a lot of games where he's kind of out there on his own, without Paul [George] and Joel [Embiid]. He's handled that really great," the head coach said.

The underlying subplot to the issue of Maxey's workload is that the Sixers haven't gotten consistent offensive production from Quentin Grimes and Jared McCain.

Grimes is below the league average in accuracy on threes and twos. He's dishing 1.76 assists for each turnover he commits. As capable a defender as Grimes has been at times, he just hasn't been efficient enough with the ball in his hands.

McCain, on the other hand, has been fighting an uphill battle ever since his return from the meniscus injury that kept him out most of his rookie season. The emergence of rookie VJ Edgecombe has inherently applied pressure to McCain's job, giving him little margin for error on the fringes of Nurse's rotation. So he's likely been pressing as a shooter. With all of those things working against him, McCain hasn't produced much of anything this season and has already been on multiple assignments with the Sixers' G League affiliate in Delaware.

In a perfect world, Maxey would be able to spend more time resting while some combination of Grimes, McCain, Edgecombe, George and Embiid power the second unit. But in the Sixers' reality, they can only truly count on staggers involving the quartet of Maxey, Edgecombe, George and Embiid.

When you combine the tighter circle of trust with the time Embiid and George have missed, of course Maxey isn't getting much time to recharge on the bench.

"He played a lot of minutes in a back-to-back. I would expect him to be tired. But, yeah, we just try to do the best we can," Nurse explained.

"Certainly on days off, he's pretty limited on what he's doing. Hopefully we get to a point where we can cut his minutes down some. Try to sneak in a few longer stints of him resting."

Maxey shot below 40 percent from the field in three of the Sixers' last four games. Maxey attempted five or fewer free throws in all four games, a sign that he hasn't been as aggressive in getting to the rim.

Nurse chalked his inefficient night against the Phoenix Suns up to simply missing great looks. A random poor-shooting night over the course of a long season.

"That's going to happen once in a while. But I'm sure he'll bounce back [against the Rockets]."

Maybe it's that. Or maybe the reality is that Maxey is only human.