After experiencing a career year with the Washington Wizards this season, could 29-year-old forward Mike Scott reunite with his former coach Mike Budenholzer and join the Milwaukee Bucks in 2018 NBA Free Agency?
Who is Mike Scott?
Having wrapped up his sixth season on the NBA level this year, Mike Scott is a known quantity as he’s set to enter free agency less than two weeks from now.
What wasn’t known was how Scott would be able to reclaim his NBA career, much less his life, after things had gone awry for him in significant ways both on and off the court.
While he had battled through a long line of injuries, it was his felony drug arrest in July of 2015 that had threatened to derail his life as he knew it.
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For the next two years, the possibility of being handed a maximum 25-year prison sentence unsurprisingly weighed on Scott as he tried to stay the course while a member of the Atlanta Hawks.
Eventually, Scott’s many physical ailments caught up to him in his performance on the court, which spurred him being shipped out by the Hawks at the trade deadline to the Phoenix Suns, who subsequently waived him.
A few months later and after being out of the NBA completely, Scott’s case was ultimately tossed out after the judge came to the conclusion that he, along with his brother Antonn, were racially profiled by the officer that had arrested them on that fateful day.
When talking about the incident extensively with Candace Buckner of the Washington Post in early February of this year, Scott touched on how that whole ordeal infected the perception of him around the league, despite the ultimate outcome of the case:
"“They probably thought I was a drug dealer, a drug user,” Scott says. “I got all that type stuff. I got all that hate mail. On social media, people were killing me. Just got to take it. When the spotlight’s on you, it’s your turn. So I’m pretty sure that’s what [NBA teams] were thinking: ‘He’s a troublemaker.’ I’m always going to have that, even though we got acquitted of everything. We don’t have no record or nothing but it’s still going to be with me. Forever.”"
As it turns out, that all set the stage for Scott to recapture his place within the league in a big way this year as a member of the Washington Wizards.
So without further ado, let’s dive further into what Mike Scott has to offer, assess his case on the open market and examine his potential fit with the Milwaukee Bucks.