The Minnesota Timberwolves’ last two games mark the first time this season that Shake Milton has scored double-digit points for the Wolves twice in a row. Shake had likely his best offensive game so far this year in Minnesota’s win over the Memphis Grizzlies, scoring 17 points on 6 of 9 shooting, while hitting 3 of his 5 threes.
In the Wolves’ loss to the New Orleans Pelicans, Shake scored 12 points on a less efficient 4 of 10 shooting. He was one of only three Timberwolves players (outside of the players who came in in garbage time) to have a positive plus-minus. There was still “plenty of meat left on the bone” in both performances. But they marked a positive trend upward for Shake, who the Wolves signed in part to provide a burst of scoring off the bench.
Milton has had a difficult time fitting into the team’s offense through most of Minnesota’s first 20 games. In 5 seasons playing for the Philadelphia 76ers, Shake averaged 9.3 points and 2.7 assists per game. He shot 36.5% from three in Philadelphia and 50.1% from inside the arc. But he’s averaging 6.1 points this season and 1.6 assists while shooting 25% from three and 45.9% inside. It seems clear from those stats that part of Shake’s slow start to the season can be explained by the fact that he was in a shooting slump.
His current 3-point shooting percentage is a significant outlier from the rest of his career, and the sample size is so small that a couple of good or bad games can change the percentage a lot. Through the first 20 games of the season, Milton made 8 of his 38 threes (21%). But after hitting 3 of 6 in his last two games, his season average is already up to 25%. Shake’s perimeter shooting numbers should return closer to his career average once the sample size gets bigger, assuming he can stay out of the slump or even get hot for a while.
Still, when it comes to Shake’s shooting in the paint, it feels like there may be a little more to it than just a slump. Milton’s inability to score inside the arc has stood out at the beginning of the season, and I believe a big part of that is because he’s still learning how to play with his new teammates. Shake is one of two regular rotation players who are new to the Timberwolves this year.
Given how differently the Wolves operate than most other teams in the league in their two big lineups, it seems only natural that it may take him a while to get adjusted. Mike Conley and a couple of Rudy Gobert’s other former teammates have noted that it takes a while, sometimes even years, to learn how to play well with Gobert on offense because he’s a rim-running big who needs the ball in the right spots.
Shake’s offensive success won’t be predicated on throwing lobs to Rudy, of course, although he has executed several of them. They are unlikely to get a ton of pick-and-roll reps together unless it comes in the flow of the offense in the few minutes they play together. Rather, Shake and all the other guards who have played with the Wolves since Gobert joined the team have had to learn how to navigate space on an offense that plays with two bigs at almost all times, one of whom can’t space the floor.
Clean attempts at the rim often don’t come easy for Minnesota’s guards unless they happen in transition, during designed plays, or after a missed defensive assignment. Part of the downside of having two centers on the court almost all the time is that the paint is often clogged on offense because one of two big men is almost always there looking for a way to establish post position or be close enough to the hoop to crash the boards after shot attempts. That means that guards attempting to drive to the rim have smaller lanes to do it in, and it’s easier for a second defender to collapse and double team them as they go up for a shot.
“Never minds” have become a new stat for Wolves fans who track how many times opponents dribble into the paint, see Gobert, and then either pass out to a teammate or fully turn and go a different direction. However, the same sometimes happens to Minnesota’s offense. Anthony Edwards, Jaden McDaniels, and Shake sometimes get separation on the perimeter, but once they drive past their first defender, they see that the lane is clogged and choose to pull up in the midrange instead of driving to the rim. Ant and Jaden have been shooting well from the midrange this year and may be using it to their advantage now that they are used to playing with so much size. Still, it took them both a while to get used to it, and it makes sense that Shake would too.
Of course, this is not meant to be an indictment of Minnesota’s roster construction. The two-big lineups can benefit the Wolves’ offense a lot when they play against teams with thinner or smaller bigs, like the San Antonio Spurs or the Golden State Warriors. Gobert and Karl-Anthony Towns are both strong enough to overpower many players in the post or at least put pressure on the rim by being a lob threat, and this often leads to a ton of profitable and easy offense. The team is 17-5 and has the No. 1 defense in the league largely because of their bigs. The positives have outweighed the negatives significantly.
However, on nights when they play teams like the Pelicans, the low-hanging fruit in the paint becomes much harder to grab. New Orleans has Jonas Valanciunas, a 6’11”, 265 lbs. center protecting the paint, and opponents can’t move him off his spot easily. When the lane is clogged for the guards, and the bigs can’t get easy buckets in the paint, the team’s offense tends to become limited in what it can do.
Still, it seems like Shake is beginning to learn how to find his spots within Minnesota’s offense in the last two games. Even when the paint is clogged, threes, mid-range shots, and perhaps most importantly, floaters should naturally open up. Conley has played with Gobert for the longest time, and he has set a good example for his teammates of how they can use Gobert’s gravity to their advantage.
One of the signature parts of the Conley-Gobert pick-and-roll game is that Conley is good at disguising whether he’s going to stop short and shoot a floater or throw a lob to Gobert. Often, he lets the defense dictate which decision he will make. If Rudy’s defender stays home, Mike flips the floater. If Rudy’s man comes up to contest, he throws a lob. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which one is happening until the ball is in the hoop or in Gobert’s hands.
However, Conley doesn’t exclusively go to the floater in pick-and-roll, but he goes to it often because he knows he can create clean shot opportunities with it when the defense is collapsing. Lately, Shake has been, too. In the first quarter of the Memphis game, Shake got the ball passed to him after an offensive rebound. Shake drives towards the lane, but upon getting there, three Grizzlies defenders collapse. A fourth has inside position on Gobert, so the lob isn’t open. Without hesitation, Shake stops short at the free throw line, using the defender’s backward momentum to make space for himself and knocks down the floater.
In the first quarter of the game against the Pelicans, Naz Reid lost control of the ball driving to the basket but saved it before going out of bounds by pivoting and lobbing the ball up. Milton used all of his 7-foot wingspan to jump and pull it out of the sky with one hand. Since three Pelicans defenders were already in the paint, he took one step, pulled up for a floater, and drained it.
Additionally, Shake seems to be getting more comfortable using Rudy’s screens to get an open shot on the perimeter. That’s something we see Conley and Ant do all the time. Instead of driving after a pick from Rudy, they use the extra second of free space to fire off a quick three. He did it twice in the game against Memphis. The first happened on a play where the initial action involved Shake setting a pick for Naz. When Reid was unable to get free Kyle Anderson passed the ball to Milton, who went to the top of the key to reset. Rudy walks up and sets a screen on Shake’s defender, and Shake steps around Rudy and drains the three before the help defense can get close out.
On the second play, Naz got three defenders to collapse on him in the paint and threw the ball out to Shake on the perimeter. Rudy steps up to set a pick on Derrick Rose, who is sprinting to try to get out to Shake. Seeing how far Rose’s momentum is moving towards Gobert, Shake decides to reject the screen, and Rose is forced to stop hard in his tracks before running into Gobert. This gives Shake the space to fire a three, which he hits again.
Shake will have to continue to be more consistent as a scorer to make the impact on offense that Minnesota’s front office and fans hoped he would at the beginning of the season. Still, he has been finding more creative ways to score while working with the bigs and is hitting his shots more consistently. That makes me believe that he is getting more comfortable playing with this unorthodox Wolves roster and will continue to improve as the season goes on.
