Tyrese Maxey discusses his growth next to James Harden for Sixers
CHARLESTON, S.C. — The Philadelphia 76ers are reaping the benefit of having James Harden for a full training camp ahead of the 2022-23 season as they continue their quest for a title.
Harden was acquired from the Brooklyn Nets at the 2022 trade deadline as the Sixers sought to seriously contend for a title. The Beard only played 21 games with the team and that was not enough time to really build any chemistry out on the floor.
Now that the Sixers have a full training camp with him, the expectation is he and Tyrese Maxey will much better as a guard duo.
“It’s gonna be a process,” Maxey said. “It’s really good for us to have this training camp because James only got to play 21 regular season games with us last year. He got thrown into the fire. We were successful, but we didn’t reach the goal that we wanted to reach, so it’s good to have these days of training camp with just practice and the reps and the reps, you keep repping it, the best will come to light.”
The big thing for Maxey is continuing to find the balance between scoring and facilitating. While he will be a scorer on the floor next to Harden, coach Doc Rivers wants the ball in his hands as well to continue the team’s growth.
“He talked to me a lot,” Maxey said of conversations with Rivers. “He was just telling me I can’t just run up the court and just letting James, leave him back there by himself all the time. So it has to be a good balance of me on the ball and off the ball. That’s one thing that he wanted us to work on and I think we did that well today (Wednesday).”
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