Philadelphia 76ers: Shake Milton closes out the season on a high note

Has Shake Milton‘s fourth season with the Philadelphia 76ers been a disappointment?

… yeah, it kind of has. No offense to Milton, who has been on and off the injury report seemingly all season long due to a number of injuries none the more severe than a back injury that robbed him of 18 games over the month of January, but when you look at his stats in 2021-22 versus 2020-21, or even 2019-20, it’s hard not to be a tad underwhelmed with his production.

Last season, Milton was a scoring sixth man. He wasn’t a particularly efficient one mind you, as he only shot 45 percent from the field and 35 percent from beyond the arc, but for a team that finished out the regular season with the best record in the East, having an average of 13 points per game from a single bench contributor played a pretty solid part in the team’s success.

Fast forward to 2021-22, and everything about Milton’s game has regressed, from his field goals attempted to his field goal percentage to even his 3 point shooting percentage, which has dipped all the way down to 32.3, which is .05 percentage points higher than the career-low set during his rookie season. While Milton still put up an average of 7.8 points per game and had 20 contests where he scored into double-digits, those games became fewer and further between since he returned from his aforementioned back injury, as he averaged just 5.0 points between February 11th and April 9th.

Suddenly a part-time player in Doc Rivers’ rotation, Milton was still good for the occasional game, but his numbers seldom reached their pre-James Harden heights, which is bad news for a player heading into a contract year, and bad news for the Sixers, as their bench ranked among the least utilized units in the association.

Does Shake Milton have a future with the Philadelphia 76ers? Will he play well enough next season to earn a long-term contract extension as the team’s premier bench performer? Or will he find himself traded away at some point over the next 12 months to a young team happily looking for a reclamation project? Only time will tell, but in the final regular season game, Milton put on a show for the fans in attendance surely disappointed by the absence of James Harden and Joel Embiid.

A healthy Shake Milton would be amazing for the Philadelphia 76ers.

When the playoffs open up in roughly a week, the Philadelphia 76ers will probably roll into their first-round bout against the Toronto Raptors with an eight-man rotation.

Now granted, that rotation will look different when the team is playing in Philadelphia versus Toronto, as there’s that little matter of Matisse Thybulle‘s confusing vaccination status, but as a general rule, one should expect to see the regular season starting five plus Danny Green, Georges Niang, a backup center, and a reserve guard filling out all 240 of available minutes in any given game.

Will Shake Milton ultimately win the reserve backcourt spot over Furkan Korkmaz? Probably so, assuming he doesn’t go super cold for a bit too long for Doc Rivers’ taste, of course, but he will surely have Korkmaz breathing down his neck for the 10-ish minutes a game Tyrese Maxey won’t be on the court if not lose his spot entirely if the “Turkish Delight” hits a shot or two right out of the gates.

How can Milton prevent that from happening? Well, playing like he did in the Sixers’ final game of the regular season certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Tasked with playing an expansive 33 minutes of action thanks in large part to the absence of James Harden, Milton came out of the locker room hot and kept it up until the song played with 24.9 seconds left on the clock. He hit 11 of his 18 shots from the field, including 1-3 from beyond the arc, and was perfect from the line with seven makes on seven shots, a mark tied by Maxey in his own impressive showing.

Paired up with Paul Reed for much of the contest, who had his own career-evening by scoring 25 points and six rebounds in 21 minutes, Milton ran the show when Maxey was off the court and largely made good decisions facilitating for Korkmaz, Thybulle, and Isaiah Joe. He put the ball where it needed to go, which is exactly what a backup guard needs to do when on the court playing alongside Joel Embiid, and ended up dropping 30 points, which is just nine below his career average.

While it’s foolish to expect Milton to drop that many points in 8-12 minutes of playoff action per game, having a second sparkplug who can potentially produce if things get stagnant is valuable.

Who knows, maybe this was just an aberration. Every player in the NBA is capable of such lofty production, but what separates bench performers from the stars is how frequently they can do it. Maybe this was just the bi-monthly “Shake Milton game” fans have become accustomed to, and his stat line will look more like his averages from mid-February through the penultimate game of the year. If that is, in fact, what happens, the fans in attendance will have a nice memory to harken back to. But if it proves to be more than that, the start of a new chapter in his still-young career, then the Philadelphia 76ers will be very happy indeed.