Tyrese Maxey is prepared ‘to fight through’ his injury and the Sixers’ current situation
Following his hamstring injury, the star guard takes it in stride, saying "At the end of the day, it’s life. You got to keep continuing on."
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LOS ANGELES — Tyrese Maxey sat inside the gym at the John Wooden Center on UCLA’s campus, wearing a compression sleeve on his right hamstring.
The 76ers All-Star point guard felt a little better Friday morning, two days after injuring that hamstring against the Los Angeles Clippers.
“It’s a little frustrating,” he said of being unable to play. “But at the end of the day, it’s life. You got to keep continuing on. That’s how it goes, kind of continuing to fight through it. I mean we had to fight through the Joel [Embiid] stuff and the [Paul George] stuff. And this is something I have to keep going through.
“It will make us better in the long run.”
Maxey will be reevaluated in one week. The expectation is that he could miss up to two weeks.
If so, he could miss six or seven games, starting with Friday night’s contest against the Los Angeles Lakers at Crypto.com Arena.
Maxey doesn’t know how his injury happened.
“But I felt it early in the third [quarter],” he said. “I kept playing, just trying to see if I could loosen up. But I realized that it was still tight, and [I] couldn’t really accelerate like I wanted to.”
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With that, the 24-year-old didn’t return to the game in the fourth quarter.
Embiid will make his season debut in Tuesday’s NBA Cup matchup against the New York Knicks at the Wells Fargo Center. This comes after serving a three-game suspension for an altercation with Inquirer columnist Marcus Hayes. He missed the entire preseason and first six games of the regular season because of load management of his left knee injury.
The Sixers took a 1-6 record and a four-game losing streak into Friday’s contest. Even though he’s sidelined, Maxey thinks the Sixers can buck their current trend.
“Taking it day by day, honestly, one step at a time,” he said. “We got to get one. We have to get one game. We can’t focus on getting back to .500 or focus or getting back to a certain level or a standard or anything like that. You got to focus on getting one game at a time.
“Once you get one game at a time, build our habits back. And then you can start going on a run.”