Shaking Up the Lineup: Doc Rivers Admits Change Could Be Coming Soon

As long as Ben Simmons remains off the court, the Sixers will continue to face a lot of uncertainty regarding their lineups. When the three-time All-Star point

As long as Ben Simmons remains off the court, the Sixers will continue to face a lot of uncertainty regarding their lineups. When the three-time All-Star point guard stuck to his plan to hold out from the Sixers, Doc Rivers was forced to choose between Tyrese Maxey and Shake Milton as they didn't employ another reliable ball-handler.

Two games into the preseason, Rivers was left with no choice but to select Maxey as the starter since Shake Milton sprained his ankle. Four games into the regular season, Maxey started while Furkan Korkmaz backed him up.

By the time the fifth game approached, Shake Milton was finally making his season debut. After getting cleared for action ahead of Thursday's game against the Detroit Pistons, Milton came off the bench for Philly.

He checked in for 16 minutes and led the bench in scoring as he drained five of his ten shots from the field for 13 points. Weeks ago, before the Sixers started the regular season and before Milton went down, Doc Rivers hinted the Sixers might not have a permanent starting lineup as long as Simmons remains away from the team.

Now that Milton's slowly but surely inserting himself back into the mix, Rivers is already discussing the possibility of shaking things up sooner than later. A couple of hours before Thursday's matchup against Detroit, Doc discussed the state of the lineups -- and once again reiterated that nothing is set-in-stone right now.

“Like I said before the year, I do think we’re going to start changing lineups more and more," Rivers admitted. "I do think this may be one of those teams, until Ben comes back, that we have to change lineups."

Rivers' comments regarding the lineups came just moments before he revealed that he currently likes Tyrese Maxey playing with the bench unit more than he likes the second-year guard playing with the starters. While the biggest shake-up would be benching Maxey in favor of Milton in the starting lineup, Rivers expanded his thoughts on what he might like to do in the near future.

"Sometimes you know, we’ll just go the other way," he explained. "I just think we have guys like, you know, one thing we would never be able to do because of injury, really I think we ran it out the other night for the first time maybe was Georges at the four and Tobias at the three. We just haven’t had a lot of looks at lineups so far because we haven’t had our guys on the floor. But that’s one lineup for sure. We haven’t played any small ball lineups yet really. Except for when the game Drum went out went small because we had no choice. Those are things we still want to do.” 

Now that the Sixers got another key prospect back in Shake Milton, Rivers could begin implementing his new ideas into the game plan as early as Saturday night when they face the Atlanta Hawks. It's unclear when and what Rivers plans to do, but he made it clear that he intends to stick to making changes as the year progresses.

Justin Grasso covers the Philadelphia 76ers for Sports Illustrated. You can follow him for live updates on Twitter: @JGrasso_.