The bench for the Philadelphia 76ers hasn’t been great all season long and the trade that landed James Harden has made it worse thanks to the subtraction of Andre Drummond. Now, it can be argued that the Sixers have the worst bench of any playoff team.
Fans can easily point to the regressed play of DeAndre Jordan and the poor shooting of Furkan Korkmaz as the main reasons. However, they aren’t the only reasons why the club has struggled. Shake Milton also shares a portion of the blame as well.
The Philadelphia 76ers need more from Shake Milton.
This season hasn’t been great for the former second round pick. He’s missed a good portion of the season with injuries and has only played in 42 games of the 76ers 69 games. He’s shooting a career-low 29.3 percent from the 3-point line.
However, as of late it has been especially rough for Milton, the following stats are from NBA.com. In the last six games, Milton has averaged 1.0 points on 22.2 percent from the floor and 40.0 percent from deep. What’s worse is that he’s only attempting 1.5 shots in 12.3 minutes per game.
Milton is a volume shooter so not getting a lot of shot attempts is the worse thing for his game. The second unit needs a secondary creator behind whichever star is on the court with that group. Milton is capable of being that player, but it appears that head coach Doc Rivers isn’t letting him take on that role.
If Rivers allows Milton to be a secondary or third option as a creator coming off the bench, then the second unit could be a little bit more of a threat on offense. Unleashing Milton on offense will help the Philadelphia 76ers bench woes, but isn’t a permanent fix beyond this season.