So, how many times can somebody win the NBA’s Most Improved Player award?
The question is worth asking, given what we’ve seen from Tyrese Maxey over the first four games of the 2025-26 season. The biggest talent gap in the NBA is the one between very good and truly great. If Maxey has indeed bridged that gap, he will have achieved a more consequential feat than when he went from very good starter to borderline All-Star during the 2023-24 season.
I don’t want to focus this column on the Most Improved Player award. In fact, I asked the question mostly in jest. However, it does offer a good framework for contextualizing the transformation we’ve seen from Maxey over the course of four games. When he won the award in 2024, his scoring averages jumped from 20.3 to 25.9 points per game.
Two years later, he is averaging 37.5 points per game, up from 26.3 in 2023-24. I’m not an abacus, but I’m pretty sure that’s a significant leap, percentage-wise. The Sixers are 4-0 primarily because Maxey has been scoring at a level that ranks among the rarest of the rare.
Additionally, all you need to know about Tyrese Maxey’s performance through four games is the company that he is keeping. The names he’s associated with are almost as comical as the numbers.
» READ MORE: Tyrese Maxey MVP talk, a ‘box office’ backcourt, and what else they’re saying about the Sixers’ 4-0 start
The most commonly occurring?
Michael Jordan.
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Maxey’s 150 points are the fifth-highest total in the first four games of a season in the three-point era. The three highest belong to Jordan. In fourth place: Russell Westbrook’s 151 points in his MVP season (2016-17). Just behind Maxey are Steph Curry and Anthony Davis, followed by Giannis Antetokounmpo, James Harden, and Kobe Bryant.
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Among players with at least 160 minutes played through the first four games of a season, Jordan’s 1989-90 season ranks first with a 35.1 Game Score, a metric created by NBA columnist John Hollinger that attempts to measure a player’s total offensive output in a game. Maxey’s 29.2 Game Score this season ranks third, behind Jordan and Shaquille O’Neal. The next three players on the list: Jordan (1988-89, 28.9), Hakeem Olajuwon (1993-94, 28.9), and Larry Bird (1987-88, 28.7).
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Jordan and Maxey are the only two players to score at least 150 points through four games with a true shooting percentage of at least .600.
There isn’t any cherry-picking going on with these numbers. However you slice ’em or dice ’em or group ’em up, the story is the same. Maxey is playing at a level that is almost exclusively the domain of basketball’s greatest individual scorers.
Elite volume plus elite efficiency is the hardest formula to execute on an NBA hardwood. Maxey has done it, and he has done it after spending his summer specifically working on it.
By the end of last season, it was fair to wonder if Maxey had reached his ceiling. He was clearly a very good player who could absolutely be the second or third scoring option on a championship team, but who wasn’t suited for life as a team’s prime alpha.
With Joel Embiid sidelined for most of the season, Maxey averaged a career-high 21 field goal attempts per game but a career-low .511 effective field goal percentage. He shot an uncharacteristically mediocre .337 from three-point range and didn’t see an uptick in his trips to the foul line.
» READ MORE: Sixers pick up Jared McCain’s third-year team option
“My rookie year through my third year, I would get so angry at Joel sometimes when he’d get double-teamed,” Maxey said with a laugh. “I’d be like, bro, I’m wide open. He’d say, I can’t see you. Then people started double-teaming me. He’d say, ‘I’m wide open,’ and I’d say, ‘I really can’t see you.’”
Maxey said it took him a few months last season before he felt himself getting more comfortable and effective playing as the center of attention. By the summer, he’d gained a pretty good understanding of the improvements he needed to make in order to thrive in such a role.
Four games into the season, those improvements sure look like they’ve occurred. Not only is he thicker and stronger, but more decisive in his downhill attack. Maxey is getting to the rim with the ability to dictate at the point of contact. There is no greater testament than his 11.5 free-throw attempts per game, more than double his average from last season.
Maxey’s statistical line right now is an all-time great sort of line: 37.5 points per game, 8.3 assists, a .474 three-point percentage.
The big question: Is it sustainable?
Even more singular than Maxey’s scoring totals is the amount of time he has spent on the court. It has been more than 15 years since anybody played as much as Maxey has in the Sixers’ first four games. His 172 total minutes are the most by any player since Gerald Wallace logged 172 for the Hornets in the first four games of 2009-10.
» READ MORE: The Sixers’ 4-0 start by the numbers: Here are seven key statistics
There have been a lot of questions about the eventual fit of Jared McCain, last year’s rookie sensation, who is nearing his return from a thumb injury. Where will the minutes come from? Well, start with Maxey’s. Keep in mind that last year’s MVP, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, averaged 34.2 minutes per game.
“Hopefully we can kind of just, whatever, hold the line a little bit until we get a little more back,” coach Nick Nurse said after the Sixers’ overtime win over the Wizards on Tuesday. “McCain will be a big part of that three-guard rotation to kind of cut some of those minutes down.”
Of course, the Sixers probably aren’t 4-0 if any of Maxey’s minutes are going to anybody else. That’s how good he has been. If that’s how good he remains, it will be an organizational game-changer.
