Everyone Is Failing Markelle Fultz

Everyone has handled just about every second of Markelle Fultz‘s rookie campaign the wrong way. We can say this with certainty because no one seems to know a single thing about Fultz’s first season in the NBA other than the fact that he played in four games, looked bad, and was subsequently shut down.

Beyond that, no one seems to know what the real story is. Maybe he had a terrible shoulder injury that will cost him the remainder of the season, or perhaps he’ll be back tomorrow. Who knows, because his timetable has been all over the place. Maybe the shoulder injury was tied to him trying to change up his shot, or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe he has the yips, but instead of forgetting how to throw a strike, he forgot how to shoot a basketball. Maybe it’s some combination of all three. No one actually knows.

All of this is insanity. The fact of the matter is the Philadelphia 76ers don’t owe anyone an answer on Fultz’s status, his health, or anything else. They owe one thing (making sure he is at a place where he can have a long and successful basketball career) to one person (Fultz). Beyond that, no one is owed anything.

And yet the messaging regarding his road to recovery are all over the place. Take, for instance, the fact that the Sixers are perfectly content to let Fultz’s work to get back onto the court be a public thing, as evidenced by the fact that videos like this keep surfacing.

It seems like a weekly occurrence. A video from a member of the Sixers’ beat will pop up on the internet which shows how Fultz’s shot is looking this week. Every now and then it looks fine. More frequently, it looks like something is wrong. They will tweet the video out, sites like ours will write it, you will click on it and fire jokes/commentary off, and in a few days, we’ll go through this lifecycle again.

There are two crazy things here. The first is that there is zero reason for that cycle not to happen with how Fultz’s recovery currently exists. Philadelphia lets him shoot around with cameras in the building, and obviously, those cameras are going to seek him out and capture a clip of him shooting. Those videos are going to get written up because the No. 1 overall pick going through this is indeed major news in the world of basketball.

The second is that this is the single most avoidable thing on earth. There is no reason why the struggles a 19-year-old who is new to the whole “professional athlete” thing is currently experiencing have to happen publicly.

J.J. Redick was 100 percent correct when he said it’s weird people are obsessing over Fultz’s recovery, but the reason it’s so (for lack of a better word) captivating is that it seems like someone’s No. 1 priority is making sure people still are aware that Fultz is alive and his jumper is a work in progress.

In fairness to the Sixers, an excerpt from the deep dive into Fultz’s road to recovery by Kyle Neubeck of Philly Voice shows that they’re ultimately trying to let Fultz have the same autonomy that Joel Embiid had during his recovery process. Neubeck wrote that “[Fultz] does not want to be known as the kid who backed down from the challenge, knowing he has already overcome plenty to get here at all. The Sixers have currently chosen to empower that, rather than letting a teenager become consumed by inner demons away from the spotlight.”

This is an endorsement of Fultz in a way. The Sixers trust that he knows his body and where he is in his recovery process better than anyone, because, well, no one knows that better than Fultz himself.

The approach, at its core, is good, even if the Sixers will fumble the ball due to the fact that it seems like the team is speaking out without a clear-cut idea of what’s going on. There’s the mixed messaging we’ve heard about Fultz’s process — for example, here’s what Sixers coach Brett Brown has said about the rookie guard on Feb. 6 after a win against the Washington Wizards, per Philly.com.

“He doesn’t go through everything — there are some drills that I take him out of — but he does go through a lot. He does go through a large majority of the practice. It isn’t 100 percent yet, but it is a very large majority of our practices.”

When asked, specifically, what drills Fultz can’t do, Brown said “When I feel like there’s some conditioning stuff, I’ll take him out of it. But it’s not much.” He explained that Fultz’s lack of in-game conditioning makes having him go through practice difficult. This is fair, and certainly makes it sound like Fultz is well on the road to recovery.

Three days later, Sixers president and general manager Bryan Colangelo seemed to render most of this pointless when he said Fultz’s range is currently “within the paint basically. Paint shots, perimeter shots are kind of where you draw a line. But anything instinctive going to the hole, talk about shot creation and what he’s able to do just some of the rise ups, it’s nice to see.”

While it’s baffling to see a disconnect between two of the most powerful people in the organization, this is not all on Philadelphia despite the fact that it has the ability to pull him from the public eye. Like Neubeck wrote, Fultz has a lot of power in this situation, as evidenced by the fact that he wants his practice routine to happen and not as far away from cameras as possible out of his desire to go through a “normal” recovery process. And as is the case with any teenager, a number of people have a vested interest seeing him succeed.

There are the Sixers, who get the brunt of the criticism for all of this. And there is Keith Williams, a longtime family friend and trainer who, as Neubeck wrote, the team believes played a role in Fultz’s shot looking differently between the end of the team’s Summer League slate and training camp.

But during that month-and-a-half hiatus, Fultz continued to work on his game in solitude with the help of his trusted trainer. When he returned to the public eye in late September, it was clear something had gone wrong.

Williams denied this is the case — “Why would someone who shot so well change his shot?” he rhetorically asked during a radio appearance earlier this year. Williams also, per Neubeck, is among a group of people who goes through private workouts at a high school gym with Fultz, unbeknownst to the Sixers. This is crazy, and it makes sense that the team wouldn’t be happy that the guy who is responsible (in their eyes) for breaking Fultz’s shot is now instructing him through workouts separate from the team.

And as we learned on Tuesday, thanks to Derek Bodner of The Athletic, Williams played a major role in Fultz’s shot changing. Bodner wrote, via r/NBA, that the pair actually worked to change the way Fultz shot the ball before he was drafted by the team.

These changes were described as an effort to quicken his shot, shorten the dip in his shooting mechanics and bring his set point over to the right side of his body, according to sources with knowledge of the changes Fultz made over the summer.

The early stages of these changes were evident by the time Fultz began working out for teams leading up to the draft last June, according to a source who spoke to The Athletic and was privy to these workouts. The changes became more pronounced by the time Fultz arrived at training camp in September.

Was this a good decision? Obviously not, considering everything we know now. But like everything in this saga, it can be boiled down to a simple fact: Everyone wants to see the best version of Markelle Fultz, the player who was considered a no-brainer for the No. 1 pick in the 2017 NBA Draft. What we’re ultimately dealing with is a case of too many people — whether it be the Sixers, Williams, Fultz, or anyone else we may not know — having no idea of the best way to go about fixing that issues.

Right now, there are too many cooks in the kitchen with different ideas of how to make things right. For Fultz’s future, everyone needs to come together and work together on a plan to get his career back on track.