PHILADELPHIA — Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey buried the Washington Wizards to lead the Philadelphia 76ers to their fifth straight win. It took just one play to spark a massive third-quarter run that ignited the Sixers' 146-128 win.

Embiid posted a historic third quarter, scoring 29 points without missing a shot. He's no stranger to explosive scoring outbursts but he didn’t do this alone. Maxey put his growth as a playmaker on display and freed him up for numerous easy buckets down low. In a not dissimilar fashion to how Embiid and another star guard used to operate, Maxey got into the paint and fed Embiid with nice passes on his a to a double-digit-assist night. This time, he tallied a career-high of 11 while Embiid poured on 48 points in 31 minutes.

Skip ahead to the 2:29 mark of Embiid's highlight reel to see how he and Maxey used the empty side pick-and-roll to perfection. Maxey drives hard to his right to draw Embiid's man and then hits him with precise timing and accuracy. Maxey assisted Embiid three times in the first few minutes of the second half and they each made trips to the foul line.

The Sixers keep the guys on the weak side busy by having the other three guys relocate to the arc and/or spot-up for a three. Maxey manipulates the defense into cheating over to him only to drop passes to a rolling Embiid. Not even clockwork runs as smoothly as the Philly offense did in this play.

“In the first quarter, we ran it one time, and I just saw how open it was and then I just told coach don’t even call nothing anymore. Let’s just keep running it,” Embiid said after the game. “He just kept finding me, setting screens finding me, kept scoring. They made an adjustment of icing the screen and then didn’t change anything. We stuck to the two-man game. Him going back, me going back at him, and we’re still turning to the same thing. I thought it was great. Any adjustments they made, we just countered it, and I thought it was good.”

The Sixers didn’t need much to pick apart the Wizards' defense, one of the absolute worst defenses in the league. Daniel Gafford, to his credit, did give Embiid some trouble early in the game when he tried to get through him in the post. Spacing the defense out and getting Embiid a runway gave him the golden ticket to score at will, doing just that to put the game out of reach.

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“It seemed like that was a go-to thing. We saw it was open and we just, until they made an adjustment on it, we were just gonna keep hammering it,” Nurse said. “I mean, he's coming off there and the pocket passes open and he's rolling. It's good that he's just going to it 'cause he's coming with some steam at the rim and he's gonna probably get a bucket or a free throw or both. So, it's good that he just keeps reading it.

“And then they did finally switch the coverage and then he got to the outside and started laying a few in. So, that's what it looks like. You gotta make the read,” the Sixers coach concluded.

While the Sixers will have to see how Maxey and Embiid and do against legitimate defenses — say, for example, that of the Boston Celtics, who pay a visit to Philly on Wednesday — the results from the duo so far have been extremely good.