Tyrese Maxey’s path to Philadelphia had a lot more twists than most lottery picks, and one of the strangest came years before the Sixers ever called his name.
The big picture is simple: Maxey only ended up in Philly because a chain of events broke just right. Mike Muscala’s game-winning 3-pointer sent Oklahoma City’s conditional 2020 first-round pick to the Sixers, and Maxey slid out of lottery territory after COVID-19 wiped out the NCAA tournament and narrowed the pre-draft process.
But that lucky break was only part of the story. Philadelphia had nearly given away its shot at him much earlier.
Back in the 2017 draft, the Sixers sent a top-20 protected first-round pick, along with a 2020 second-rounder, to the Orlando Magic in exchange for the rights to Anžejs Pasečniks. Orlando used the pick on Pasečniks at No.
- That first-rounder had originally come from Oklahoma City in November 2016, when Philadelphia dealt Jerami Grant and received the pick plus Ersan Ilyasova.
At the time, the move made sense inside the basketball logic of the moment. Pasečniks was a 7-foot-1 Latvian center with the kind of tools teams were chasing then: a potential pick-and-roll or pick-and-pop weapon, some off-the-dribble scoring touch and rim protection.
The league was shifting toward bigger players who could stretch the floor, and Kristaps Porziņģis had already changed the way people looked at that kind of prospect. Philadelphia saw enough to draft him and stash him with CB Gran Canaria in Spain, preserving roster flexibility while it waited.
That was also the summer the Sixers took Markelle Fultz first overall, so the organization had bigger hopes riding on that draft anyway. The thinking around the Thunder pick was that it might never matter, since the post-Russell Westbrook era in Oklahoma City did not look especially promising.
But the Sixers’ plans started unraveling after that. Colangelo resigned in June 2018 after the team learned about his wife Barbara’s burner accounts on X criticizing players and the organization, with information she got from Colangelo. Fultz’s tenure was spiraling too, as thoracic outlet syndrome and the shoulder injury tied to it derailed his shot and limited him to 34 games for Philadelphia between 2017 and 2019.
By February 7, 2019, the Sixers moved on, trading Fultz to Orlando for a 2019 second-round pick and keeping that Thunder 2020 first-rounder. Then Muscala hit another big shot a year and change later, helping Oklahoma City finish 44-28 in 2019-20 and pushing the Thunder pick down to No.
- That sent it to Philadelphia, where the Sixers selected Maxey.
Philadelphia also renounced its rights to Pasečniks in July 2019 because of a roster and salary-cap crunch.
The timing mattered. After getting swept by Boston in the 2020 first round, the Sixers looked stuck, with Al Horford and Tobias Harris weighing down the cap sheet, the locker room in a rough spot and Brett Brown out of a job. Without Maxey, the path ahead would have looked even darker.
Instead, the Sixers landed a player who fit the moment. Maxey is not a carbon copy of Fultz, but in the broad sense he became the version of the guard Philadelphia had been hoping for all along. The organization had to dodge plenty of pitfalls to get him, and in the end that near-miss with Orlando turned into one of the most important turns in the franchise’s recent story.
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