Liberty Ballers’ Community Rankings: Shake Milton

Liberty Ballers is asking for the community’s help in ranking the Sixers’ full roster (12 active players, 3 inactive players, 2 two-way players) according to on-court value for the upcoming season. When casting a vote, you should concern yourself only with each player’s ability to contribute to winning this season. So, for example, maybe you believe Markelle Fultz will be a valuable member of the Sixers core over the next 5 seasons, but you also think he’ll be slight negative on the court for most of this season. Meanwhile, you expect Robert Covington to be an integral part of the starting lineup in 2018-2019, but in 3 or 4 years, you expect him to bottom out. From that perspective, Markelle would be the more valuable player over the long haul, but you should place Covington above him in this ranking, due to Covington’s projected positive contributions this year.

In our latest installment of the Liberty Ballers community ranking, we voted on the 15th most valuable member of the Sixers roster, and the results are in. The community voted Shake Milton 15th out of 17 overall in terms of projected on-court contributions for the 2018-2019 season. So rounding out the bottom three players are Shake Milton (15th), Jerryd Bayless (16th) and Demetrius Jackson (17th).

Shake Milton

A second round pick (54th overall) in the 2018 NBA Draft, Shake Milton projects as a long combo guard (possessing a nearly seven foot wingspan) who can someday provide depth to the Sixers’ backcourt. For now though, he’s signed to a two-way contract and figures to spend most of his season with the Delaware Blue Coats.

Milton had a setback around the time of the draft due to injury, which he had to fight through during the draft combine. The injury caused Milton to have a poor showing, and as a result, Milton slipped from his initial projection as a late first round to early second round talent, to nearly going undrafted before the Sixers swooped in with just six picks remaining in the NBA Draft.

Milton has drawn the interest of many Sixers fans because of his prolific three point shooting during his time at SMU, where he shot over 42% from distance in all three of his seasons in the NCAA. The three point shooting combined with Milton’s length allow many to envision the ideal Shake Milton as a 3&D role player off the bench. But as we’ve touched on already, Milton is likely to spend a lot of time in the G-League this season because he’s still raw, and so slotting him in as one of the three lowest contributors is more than appropriate.

Moving on to #14