For Philadelphia 76ers guard Shake Milton, he had one wild ride in his second season in the league. He took over as the team’s starting point guard while inside the bubble and he had to take on much more responsibility on a pretty good team.
Other than a hiccup here and there, he didn’t blink.
Milton averaged 9.3 points and 4.1 assists while shooting 34.5% from deep in the eight seeding games and then he averaged 14.5 points and shot 40% from deep in the playoffs against the Boston Celtics.
“I was kind of thrown into it and I feel like I held my own,” said Milton. “I felt like my confidence was growing each game and I’m going into the offseason excited about putting in the work.”
Those offseason plans include getting stronger for the young man out of SMU. There were a few times in the playoffs where he would be screened by the Celtics bigs and he was not able to overcome that all the time. He also struggled a bit with defending Celtics star Kemba Walker and he feels like getting stronger will help.
“Starting with my weight, putting on more weight,” said Milton. “As you can see, the game is more physical and I want to be prepared just to disrupt the game in even more ways and I feel like if I put on more weight, I can do that.”
In his defense, Walker is one of the better players in the league and he really did hold his own. He was also probably the only Sixer to knock down shots all series.
“My projection is that it’s going to be a launching pad to a very, very successful career,” said coach Brett Brown. “Sometimes you can’t say it with a confidence that I am saying it now primarily because maybe there are character flaws, maybe there’s something that you feel is an outlier and it’s a little bit fool’s gold. There aren’t any character flaws, his game isn’t fool’s gold, and he’s young.”
Milton will have a lot of work to do in the offseason, but his career projects to be a pretty solid NBA player for a long time. [lawrence-related id=37151,37147,37141]