Joel Embiid and Paul George plan to give Tyrese Maxey a gift every young star wants

The Philadelphia 76ers have started the 2024-25 season in the way fans have been dreading. Just as the era of the new Big Three began, injury fever struck, limiting the early opportunities to establish chemistry and continuity between them.

One glimmer of hope is the opportunities potentially presented to key supporting players, but there is an understandable sense of fear among 76ers fans.

Joel Embiid and Paul George missed the first week of the 2024-25 regular season and continued their streak of absences into the second. This comes after Embiid and 76ers head coach Nick Nurse told ESPN's Tim Bontemps that the plan is to keep the veteran duo out of a matchup.

This inevitably led to the 76ers struggling to fill the proverbial holes with players who otherwise would have played as reserves.

Some players, including center Andre Drummond, handled the adversity calmly. Unfortunately, this promising sign can't hide the disappointment in the status of the 76ers' superstars, both in the short term and beyond.

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

With Embiid and George no longer on the roster, this presents an opportunity for Maxey to take the next step toward superstardom. Based on the 76ers' plan above, Embiid and George will miss not only the first four games of the season, but also at least one game of Philadelphia's 13 consecutive games.

With 17 games under his belt to establish himself in the role of a No. 1 player, Maxey will have a unique opportunity to develop without the constraints of a big three-man team.

To date, Maxey has been entrusted with a workload that can aptly be described as unsustainable. Between the first three games of the season, he attempted 86 shots, including the 31 he attempted in the 76ers' opening game against the Milwaukee Bucks and the 32 he attempted in the win over the Indiana Pacers.

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

Maxey carrying that workload early on will allow him to build a relationship with his non-star teammates when Embiid and George miss games later in the season. He will also have proven that his 2023-24 All-Star season was anything but a fluke and will therefore draw even more attention from opposing defenses when his co-stars are on the court.

More importantly, it gives Maxey an early indication of the type of defense he will face every night in the playoffs.

Maxey has already found himself in this situation, as Embiid missed 43 games during the 2023-24 season. However, Tobias Harris appeared in 70 of the 76ers' 82 appearances, which took a lot of the burden off of Maxey.

With a once-in-a-lifetime chance to truly establish himself as a goalscorer, Maxey can turn a polarizing roster decision into a golden opportunity for the birth of a superstar.