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Maxeymus
The Minutes Police got a well-earned night off.
For the first time all season, Tyrese Maxey’s minutes started with a 2 (29). The Sixers got The Schedule Win To End All Schedule Wins opportunity, and Maxey did not mess around. Here is how he closed the third quarter against Washington:
Splits the pick-and-roll, lefty layup
Outrageous 3-point step-back to his left
Splits the pick-and-roll, gets his shot blocked (nice play by the defender)… but gets a bucket after Justin Edwards steal
Even more outrageous 3-point step-back to his right (video below)
Off-ball steal and breakaway dunk
Fouled on a jumper, makes both
If you are scoring at home, that is a personal 14-0 run to push the lead to 24 and make sure he got to sit the rest of the game. Star-level stuff. Kyle’s observations are here.
I do not really have anything else insightful to say about Maxey. He is an absolute monster and brings it every single night. 32.5 points per game, tied for third in the NBA in scoring. Finally when you think Maxey plateaued a bit, he just keeps improving.
Maxey’s personal motto is “one percent better every day.” Man, he lives it.
Defensive Back News That May Or May Not Be Important
The Eagles are banged-up in the secondary. With that in mind, two pieces of news that might matter…
Marcus Epps: Epps’ practice window was opened, after spending the last four weeks on injured reserve.
Darius Slay: Slay got released by the Stillers, but wants to keep playing. Good for him, that $10 million check still cashed.
Bring back the band from 2022! Is that Johnny Ganz’s music I hear? God, I hope not.
Since returning, Epps has mainly played special teams for the Eagles. But that was before Andrew Mukuba got hurt and Sydney Brown was spinning like a top trying to stay with receivers in the red zone. Could Epps, who has started 45 games in his career (including during the 2022 Super Bowl run), get the nod over Brown? Seems plausible.
As for Slay, there is a reason that he is available. Some of his PFF numbers from this season are gruesome. As someone who has not paid attention to Slay this year, has Father Time finally caught up to the ageless wonder? Possibly, maybe even probably, but the Eagles are also running Adoree’ Jackson out there every week. If the dice roll here is free, I would at least consider it.
Plus, getting Jennifer Slay’s famous banana pudding back in the locker room really could boost morale for a team whose vibes are currently in the gutter.
A few leftover Eagles thoughts
2023-2025 Comps: The “Is the 2025 team going to collapse like the 2023 team?” debates are raging, and have been for a few weeks. I get it, it’s only natural. The Eagles will be the ones to settle those debates on the field, but hey, until next Monday we are just killing time. Might as well talk about it.
If we were to make some comps to 2023, here are some off the top of my head:
A great record through three months with a middling point differential: The whole "They just know how to win" part. Well, until they don't.
A fatally flawed side of the ball: The difference is that it’s the offense this time around. That makes it more frustrating, because the Eagles’ back-seven in 2023 did not have very good personnel. No such excuse this time.
A potential December play-caller change on that fatally flawed side of the ball: Has not officially happened yet, but it very well could. The only question is who the replacement would be. Nick Sirianni himself? Scot Loeffler? Parks Frazier? Frank Reich just got done at Stanford and he’s Sirianni’s guy, what is he up to? Regardless, that new play-caller better rock the ✏️.
A potential December play-caller change on that fatally flawed side of the ball before a West Coast Monday night game: OK, this is ultra-specific but that is how my brain works. Seattle, meet the LA Chargers.
A potential December play-caller change on that fatally flawed side of the ball before a West Coast Monday night game against a backup quarterback: I am sorry, I cannot help it, it’s my weird brain! Drew Lock, meet Trey Lance.
An Achilles heel on the other/better side of the ball: That 2023 offense was better than this one, but they struggled against the blitz. And as we saw that year, Blitzin’ Bowles was the worst possible playoff matchup. We still have hope that the long layoff can allow this gassed 2025 defense to recharge, but the Eagles have a below-average run defense on the season.
A let-up after The Gauntlet? Remember The Gauntlet in 2023? Even after dispiriting losses to San Francisco and Dallas, the Eagles were 10-3. If that team was in the right headspace, they would have regrouped and walked to the NFC East title. Instead, they lost to Seattle, Arizona and the Giants on the way in. Well, the Eagles’ finishing kick is not quite that easy this time. But there are three games (at Washington, Washington, Las Vegas) that should be layups for a normal 8-4 team. Will they be? We will see.
Tush Push, not unstoppable anymore: What a great site The Tush Push Tracker is.
After his key fumble last Friday, Jalen Hurts said after the game that the play is becoming harder to run than in the past. According to the tracker, Ye Olde Tush Push is 16-26 (62 percent) on the season after the fumble. Far from an automatic play. The Eagles are just 2-8 in the last three weeks on the push.
Sean Syed is noting that defenders coming from the edge are creating havoc in multiple ways: taking out the pushers’ legs from the side or, as we saw Chicago and the Giants do, rip the ball out of Jalen’s hands. Both strategies make sense, as it’s a play that takes a while to get blown dead. And the Eagles have been forced to tweak their Tush Push formation to account for these kamikaze-style edge players.
Is this frustrating? Sure, I miss my unstoppable play. But I also can appreciate that we told teams to legally find ways to stop the play instead of using Mark Murphy as a human shield to get it banned, and they are starting to do just that. How it should work.
Dave Caldwell: Lost in all of the college talk yesterday, the Eagles lost senior personnel exec (and former Jags GM) Dave Caldwell to the University of Florida. He will be the Gators’ GM, which is a key roster-building position in the world of NIL. Caldwell had been in the Eagles front office since 2021.
You know who is a proud Florida alum? Howie Roseman. I wonder if he had something to do with this. And Howie, you also went to Fordham Law School. Can you at least send an intern or someone to fix the program that is currently in the basement of the Patriot League? We can’t even beat Georgetown!
Two last ironic points: I just found both of these kind of funny…
Tank Bigsby’s snaps: So, the Eagles trade real stuff for Bigsby and signal behind the scenes that it’s a move to juice the kick-return game. One problem: Bigsby is straight-up terrible at kick returns and Eagles fans become apoplectic at the trade. But you know what Bigsby has been pretty good at? Running the ball, which is more valuable than kick returns. But Bigsby only got one snap on Friday, and now Eagles fans are now fairly wondering why.
A.J. Brown: All season, we have spent time dissecting A.J.’s lack of involvement in the offense after wins. And then A.J. finally gets going, he mostly looks great doing so, but the breakout comes in two losses so the performances barely register. That kinda season. 🤷
Tyson Foerster, out for 2-3 months: That’s the headline. Welp, it looked bad and Foerster could not avoid the dreaded upper-body injury. The guys broke the situation down on the pod. Charlie wrote about it in detail here.
Two months and three weeks would put Foerster back on the ice on February 25th, the Orange and Black’s first game back from the three-week Olympic break. That would mean 31 games missed, or 38 percent of the Flyers’ season. Oof.
I feel bad for Foerster, who has been playing the best hockey of his career through a bunch of injuries. If you will recall, he had the weird elbow infection in the summer. He then missed four games with a foot injury after blocking a shot. Both times, he worked hard to get back on the ice quickly. And now his arm basically exploded on a one-timer.
And again, it was the best hockey of his career. Foerster has always graded out well in the #FancyStats, but when you are a winger, you do need a certain level of raw offensive production to get paid at the higher levels. Foerster was on a 50-point pace over a full season, which would have been an improvement over last year’s 43 points. And he was still driving play!
Foerster was a key cog on the team’s shutdown line with Noah Cates and Bobby Brink, though that line had been broken up in recent weeks, with Brink moving to a line with Sean Couturier and Matvei Michkov. Now, however, the line loses its play-driving heart on the wing — Foerster has long graded out as an exceptional defensive player at even strength, ranking as the fifth-best suppressor of expected goals by Evolving-Hockey’s RAPM model (which isolates play-driving talent) among NHL forwards over the past three seasons, just behind three-time Selke Trophy winner Aleksander Barkov.
This is gonna be a situation where top-line players like Matvei Michkov and Travis Konecny will have to collectively make up for Foerster’s production. But who will actually replace Foerster? Seemed like there were two legit options.
Nikita Grebenkin (Grebenks!): Grebenkin, who made the team out of camp, has been a fourth-liner for the most part. But he has the talent to be a Top-9 winger, and he is already on the team.
Alex Bump (Bumpy!): The more exciting option, as Bump has been coming on the past few weeks in Lehigh Valley after a slow start in the AHL. 13 points in his last 12 games. But Charlie explained here why that might be why the Flyers decide to keep Bump down. At least for a few more weeks.
They went with Door No. 1: Fourth-liner Carl Grundström got called up, which means Grebenkin gets bumped up to one of the top-three lines. Big promotion for Grebenks! But if Bumpy continues to develop in Lehigh Valley, well, three months is a long time.
One more potential option: The Flyers could also have theoretically made a trade to fill the Foerster hole. On yesterday’s show, Bill and Charlie discussed Elliotte Friedman’s report that Rick Tocchet would not mind reuniting with a few players from the team he coached last season (Vancouver).
I hope Tocchet is not like Doc Rivers, who kept acquiring 2009 Celtics on the 2015 Clippers. Any Tocchet reunion is probably not happening right now, but something to file away.
Setting the scene for Schwarber: Winter Meetings are next week, and when you read many of the various baseball newsbreakers, the expectation is that Kyle Schwarber is gonna sign his contract pretty early in the offseason. Might it be tomorrow? Might it be next week? I dunno, but this is not gonna be one of those Boras-style contract standoffs that lingers through February and even into spring training.
One of those newsbreakers? Our own Jimmy Steaks, who thinks the Phillies have a good shot at re-signing Schwarber.
For starters, he likes Philadelphia, likes being a Phillie, and the feeling is completely mutual from the front office to the fans. The Phillies retained hitting coach Kevin Long, which sources say was a box that Schwarber wanted checked if he was going to return. Schwarber wants to play for a winner and, as disappointing as the last few autumns have been, this is a team that projects to stay relevant and in contention. Financially, the Phils have budgeted for Schwarber’s return and can make it happen, provided a team like the Mets, Red Sox or Cubs doesn’t do something so outrageous that he considers leaving his Philadelphia comfort zone.
Schwarber does seem to love Philadelphia, and we really have a lot going for us.
Where else is he gonna find an auto insurance sponsorship that gets played on local television 10,000 times per game? Even if he finds another one, he is gonna have to film a new commercial. Where else is he gonna find the Haddonfield Starbucks? He might find a Starbucks in other places, but not the Haddonfield one. Where else will he get on Abbott Elementary? WKRP in Cincinnati has been off the air for 43 years. Where else are fans gonna make a Declaration of Independence to re-sign him? That’s right, nowhere.
If Alec Bohm likes Philadelphia, he better hope Schwarber stays around. Jeff Passan listed Bohm’s chances of getting traded as 50/50, but if the Phillies fail to re-sign Schwarber and pivot to another infielder, then Bohm is a logical candidate to be on the move. If they do re-sign Schwarber, I could see the logic in keeping Bohm for a Last Dance (lol) at one year and $10 million-ish before handing that position to Aidan Miller.
Ben Simmons wants back? Presented without comment.
Shoutout to our guy Jacob digging through the Instagram comments.
Ashley Fan Cave Contest
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It’s that simple. Enter now and you might be watching the next big game in a fan cave built by you, courtesy of Ashley.
The World Cup. La Copa Mundial. The Weltmeisterschaft. Seriously, that last one is what it’s called in Germany.
The biggest tournament in all of sports is being played in Philadelphia this summer, and the all-important draw is this Friday morning. Cuz and VG will be down at Stateside Live! to get you ready for said all-important draw. Join us!
Long night of podcastin’ for yours truly. I will report back with a Hard Knocks recap tomorrow, but fair warning, I might fast-forward through the Eagles’ parts just to get to Joe Schoen. If you do not want to wait for me, Jamie, EJ and VG offered their live reactions here.
We do have a Flyers game tonight, Buffalo at home (7:30 p.m., TNT and HBO Max). Feels like a game the Orange and Black should absolutely positively win, but it feels like they have not always won those games over the past few years.
Your tentative Wednesday schedule at PHLY:
🎙️ The Anthony Gargano Show: 9:00 a.m.
⚾ Phillies: 12:00 p.m.
🦅 Eagles: 2:00 p.m.
🦅 Cheap Seats: 7:00 p.m.
🏒 Flyers: Pre and post-game
Let’s make it a good one.
Rich Hofmann
Daily Newsletter Editor
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