Who Are You, Shake Milton?
When we talk about Shake going from being our old Tyrese Maxey to our new T.J. McConnell, it certainly sounds like a pretty serious fall from grace, and in some ways I guess it is.
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In December of 2020, on the occasion of the Philadelphia 76ers' first regular season game of the year, I tweeted about about a Sixer — and how hilarious it was that "after two straight 'superteam' seasons," he was now unquestionably the team's third-most important player. (Presumably after Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons, both of whom still seemed like a foregone 1-2 at the time.)
It wasn't Seth Curry, who wouldn't really start heating up until after Christmas. It wasn't Tyrese Maxey, who wasn't even born yet at the time of the tweet. It certainly wasn't Tobias Harris, who then was at such a low-end as a Sixer that Process Trusters were straight-up inventing expiring contracts to put into the Trade Machine for him ("Send him to Seattle for the last year of Shawn Kemp's deal, I don't care!") It wasn't Danny Green, even though that might have actually been true about him at that point. It wasn't Matisse Thybulle, even though I would have desperately wanted it to be true about him at that point. And it wasn't Furkan Korkmaz, who... well, I don't really remember what point in the Furkcoaster we were at right then, but he's only gotten that high once or twice in his bizarre Sixers career and it wasn't at that exact time.
Anyway, his name and photo are already up there in the thing, so I'll stop pretending now that there's any suspense to all this: It was Shake Milton. After a strong end to the 2019-'20 regular season (if not necessarily the ensuing postseason series against Boston) and a blistering preseason that December -- and in the midst of a 19-points-on-11-shots (three boards, three assists, no turnovers) opening night off the bench against Washington -- it seemed a not-unreasonable position to take. But here we are, a mere 15 months later, and it takes a 20-point performance in an undermanned win over the Miami Heat to show he even deserves to be a fixture in the Sixers' current rotation at all. We don't know what the future holds for Shake Milton. We don't know what the present holds for Shake Milton. We don't totally know who Shake is, really.
I guess we know one thing that Shake Milton isn't, though, and that's Tyrese Maxey. This might seem like a blindingly obvious statement to make in March of 2022, but while we never thought Shake was as good as Maxey clearly is right now, there was a time where we (or at least I) thought he could be a sort of commensurate draft steal for us, the sort of player you essentially pick up for free and improves so much so quickly that it does alter your overall outlook as a franchise. A combo guard second-rounder on a dirt-cheap rookie deal who can play a little point, defend multiple positions, show a little bounce off the dribble AND knock down open shots off the ball? Manna from heaven, as former Wolves GM David Kahn would say.
Of course, the fact that Kahn originally said it about a then-resurgent eighth-year Darko Milicic should perhaps suggest that such godsends tend to be fleeting gifts. Shake's early 2020-'21 proved turbulent -- he scored 10 points or less than for the three games after the season opener, then scored 10 or more in eight games after that, then 10 or less in four games after THAT, and so on and so on. The inconsistency was jarring, and the longer the season went, the worse the dry spells seemed to get -- and as Maxey first hit and then ultimately burst through the rookie wall at season's end, it was getting fair to wonder if he would be a bigger part of the Sixers' short-term as well as long-term plans than our for Shake.
Not to say that streaky play is in any way unique to the Sixers, or to Shake on our team. Korkmaz has also certainly struggled through some hilarious ups and downs in his 14 seasons in Philadelphia, going Omarion-icy for months at a time -- as recently as right up until two nights ago -- only to act like Klay Thompson on a bender of cocaine and positive feedback as soon as he hits, say, one three in a row. It's frustrating, but it's ultimately understandable: Furkan wasn't the first shooter to oscillate this wildly and he won't be the last. You take the good with the bad until you can't anymore, and then you bench them until Joel Embiid and James Harden need a rest night and the transparently fraudulent Miami Heat are in town.
But what makes Shake's case more vexing -- and what is a problem that actually seems unique to the Sixers -- is the biggest change in his game over the last two years: He stopped being able to shoot. That's a different thing than just being on a long cold streak, of course; Shake isn't just catching a bad run of cards, he appears to have simply become a very different (and much worse) shooter since the 2019-20 season. That's the year he shot 43% on six attempts per 36 minutes, numbers close enough to in line with his college stats that they didn't seem fluky or out of character. Since then, he's down to 33 percent, on gradually decreasing attempts per 36 -- and more importantly, his shot just looks unrecognizable when compared to his sophomore season, flatter, heavier, weaker. On another team this might register as a Big Deal, or at least a regular topic of discussion; on the Sixers, it's so far down on the list of devastating shooting-related historic developments that it barely even registers as a line item.
There are still things that Shake does well -- things that have made him a dangerous player for one Shake Milton Game at a time, if not for any extended runs of late. In many ways he seems like the best option of our bench guys for someone to lean on for greater production, assuming someone besides Georges Niang needs to score the occasional bucket or two off the pine when the games really matter. But the question of what he can be on a team that now has two ball-dominant guards -- at least one of which should be on the court at all times, unless things have gone notably badly for either us or the other guys -- when he's not much for shooting or spacing at the moment... well, it's a fair one.
Here's who I think Shake ultimately ends up being for us: T.J. McConnell. That sounds and feels like a weird comparison, given how differently the two profiled in the early stages of their respective Sixers' careers -- but watching him against the Heat on Monday, fighting his way to scooped-in layups and leaning pull-ups with that near-line-drive arc, that's who he vividly reminded me of. He doesn't quite have the passing creativity of T.J., of course -- though he's had sporadically nice alley-oop chemistry with our back-up bigs the last couple years -- but he's also bigger and stronger, and gets to the line more than 50 times total in a season. FOTB Jason Lipshutz, on a very hot prophetic run with these Sixers (minus his recent prediction of an easy win against Brooklyn), told me earlier this week we needed to get Shake some regular-season burn to gear him up for randomly scoring 17 points in a playoff game; his 14-point burst against the Hawks in Game Two last year certainly provides relevant precedent there. But that's what Shake probably means to the Sixers this season: He's the T.J. in Game Four-like curveball we can insert into a playoff game to disrupt the predictability of our pitches and hopefully get us a few runs of easy Ks in the process.
When we talk about Shake going from being our old Tyrese Maxey to our new T.J. McConnell, it certainly sounds like a pretty serious fall from grace, and in some ways I guess it is. But maybe it's just an illustration of how scarce the true Tyrese Maxeys of the world really are — the kind of players that initially exceed your expectations, and then keep exceeding even those expectations, climbing the ladder higher and higher until they legitimately can claim to be Manna From Heaven. After watching Tyrese play last night, I was stunned to think how he had grown (and was still growing) both more confident AND better as a shooter at the same time, few Sixers in recent history could boast even one of those two things, and certainly none at the same time. Not that it's that unusual a thing for a second-year prospect's development in the NBA at large, but when it comes to shooting in the Sixers' part of the world, the water has always swirled in the opposite direction. To be able to counteract that is rare, to be able to reverse it is sacred.
Maybe we don't get that twice. Maybe we had to let our dreams of Shake Milton as the shortest part of.a Sixers Big Three die so our wildest fantasies of Tyrese Maxey as a legitimate third Sixers perennial All-Star could live. And maybe ninth-man-on-an-eight-man contender isn't even the worst fate for a 54th overall pick -- especially when, at least once a season, you can still explode in an offensive fireworks display so dazzling that your never-stopped-believing head coach swears you're still the guy who hung 39 on his squad one Sunday in March. It's not the fate we wanted for Shake, but on some level, it's still important.