The NBA is overloaded with talented offensive players today, and Philadelphia 76ers star Tyrese Maxey was asked to name the toughest one to guard by position on The Deep 3 podcast. You tend to get the odd, surprising selection in these, but Maxey went with some of the best in the business.
Maxey named Stephen Curry for the point guard spot and Anthony Edwards for shooting guard. The one-time All-Star acknowledged it’s quite special what Edwards has been doing on the court lately.
Maxey also picked Shai Gilgeous-Alexander as his tweener between point guard and shooting guard. As for the small forward spot, the 24-year-old chose a former Oklahoma City Thunder superstar in Kevin Durant.
“I may say KD,” Maxey said. “… He’s 7 foot… You pressure him, you do all those things, and it’s like, okay, he shoots over me, this time he miss, the next time he makes it.”
Giannis Antetokounmpo was Maxey’s next pick at power forward. His 76ers head coach, Nick Nurse, had famously used the “Wall defense” in 2019 to slow down Antetokounmpo when he was with the Toronto Raptors. It’s no longer quite as effective as it once was, and Maxey spoke about his experience being part of that wall.
“Nick Nurse has this wall defense that he created for Giannis, and it’s like sometimes you’re there and Giannis really doesn’t care,” Maxey stated. “Coach is like, ‘Are you in the wall?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, coach, but the elbow kind of came through and I thought about it.'”
Lastly, at the center spot, Maxey went with his 76ers teammate Joel Embiid. If he couldn’t pick Embiid, he’d go with his great rival Nikola Jokic.
“If not Joel, I got to say Jokic just because he is their offense,” Maxey said. “When he’s off the court, their offense is totally different. When he gets the ball at the mid-post, and they’re cutting and doing all those different things, we got to worry about them cutting, we gotta worry about them screening.
“Then, we also got to worry about him trying to back down whoever’s guarding him and shooting the jump hook,” Maxey added. “You don’t want to trap him because he can pass, but you don’t wanna not trap him because he can get 40. Then we have a guy on our team who does the same stuff as well. And you better trap him because he will get 50.”
All the players Maxey mentioned here are more than capable of scoring 40 to 50 points on any given night. They are some of the very best offensive players in the NBA.
Gilgeous-Alexander led the league in scoring in 2024-25 by averaging 32.7 points per game. Antetokounmpo was his closest challenger at 30.4 points per game, followed by Jokic at 29.6.
Edwards, meanwhile, ranked fifth in the league in scoring at 27.6 points per game while Durant was seventh with 26.6. Maxey actually came right behind him at 26.3 points per game, an indicator of the rapid growth in his game.
Curry and Embiid didn’t make the top 10, but they have been two of the best scorers in the NBA in recent years. Curry, a two-time scoring champion, averaged 24.5 points per game in 2024-25.
Embiid has also won two scoring titles, and he put up 23.8 points per game last season. The 76ers superstar had averaged 32.5 points per game on average from 2021-22 to 2023-24, and it will be interesting to see if he can get back to that level after yet another injury-hit campaign.
As for notable omissions here, Luka Doncic is certainly a name that comes to mind. Doncic has undergone a physical transformation this offseason, and an anonymous NBA coach stated that people should be terrified. The Slovenian was already almost impossible to stop, and it will be fascinating to see how he performs in 2025-26.
