Joel Embiid, Paul George plan gives Tyrese Maxey gift every young star wants

The Philadelphia 76ers have started the 2024-25 season in the manner that fans were dreading. Just as soon as the era of a new Big Three began, the injury bug reared its head and limited the early opportunities to establish chemistry and continuity among them.

Silver linings can be found in the opportunities provided to potentially crucial supporting players, but there's an understandable sense of dread among 76ers fans.

Joel Embiid and Paul George missed the first week of the 2024-25 regular season and continued their string of absences into the second. This comes on the heels of Embiid and 76ers head coach Nick Nurse telling Tim Bontemps of ESPN that the plan is to keep the veteran duo out of back-to-backs.

That's inevitably resulted in the 76ers scrambling to fill the proverbial gaps with players who would have otherwise been playing as reserves.

Some players, including center Andre Drummond, have taken the adversity in stride. Unfortunately, that promising sign fails to mask the disappointment from the status of the 76ers' superstars, both in the short-term and beyond.

Fortunately, the 76ers' controversial plan has provided All-Star guard Tyrese Maxey with an opportunity that every young player cherishes.

76ers' Tyrese Maxey has a chance to cement his status as a superstar

With Embiid and George out of the lineup, the opportunity has come knocking for Maxey to take the next step toward superstardom. Based on the 76ers' aforementioned plan, Embiid and George will not only miss the first four games of the season, but at least one leg of Philadelphia's 13 back-to-backs.

With 17 games on the schedule for Maxey to cut his teeth in the role of a No. 1 player, he'll have a unique opportunity to develop without the restraints of a Big Three sharing touches.

Maxey has thus far been trusted with a workload that can be accurately described as unsustainable. He attempted 86 shots between the first three games of the season, including the 31 he put up during the 76ers' opener against the Milwaukee Bucks and the 32 he attempted in the win over the Indiana Pacers.

Despite the Allen Iverson level workload, Maxey is proving that being thrown to the wolves isn't necessarily a bad thing in this scenario.

Maxey carrying this workload early will enable him to build a rapport with his non-star teammates for when Embiid and George miss games later in the season. He'll also have proven that his All-Star season in 2023-24 was far from a fluke and will thus command even more attention from opposing defenses when his co-stars are on the court.

More importantly, Maxey will receive an early indication of the type of defense he can expect to face on a nightly basis in the playoffs.

Maxey has already been in a position of this nature, as Embiid missed 43 games in 2023-24. Tobias Harris appeared in 70 of the 76ers' 82 outings, however, which alleviated a significant amount of the burden that Maxey carried.

With a unique opportunity to truly establish himself as a go-to scoring threat, Maxey can turn a polarizing roster decision into a golden opportunity for a superstar to be born.