If you’ve somehow missed it, Markelle Fultz can’t shoot anymore.
Video went around this weekend of Fultz in practice, where he’s still working to return from a shoulder injury.
Markelle Fultz three-point attempt. #sixers pic.twitter.com/cASCfoWHui
— Derek Bodner (@DerekBodnerNBA) January 14, 2018
Markelle Fultz’s shooting has trended closest to looking like this today. Take that for what you will. #Sixers pic.twitter.com/Hdi82KT7UW
— Kyle Neubeck (@KyleNeubeck) January 14, 2018
Thanks to how strikingly bad it looked, the Sixers were obviously going to have to address it. Head coach Brett Brown offered up this reassuring statement, via the AP/ESPN.com:
“I’m old, and I’ve never experienced anything like this,” Sixers coach Brett Brown said Monday of Fultz’s lost shot. “I really haven’t.”
Comforting!
Brown continued:
“The organization will help him reclaim the reason he was the first pick chosen in the NBA draft,” Brown said.
…
“It’s reclaiming the shot that he used to have,” Brown said. “The timeline of when that happens, none of us know. But I feel like there is discomfort in his shoulder and it does affect his shot.”
Brown, who calls himself “a shooting coach at heart,” vows to help Fultz rediscover his shot. He plans to spend extra time with him at practice. The team has shielded Fultz from reporters since he was sidelined.
“He’s a rise-up guy. He’s a live-ball, off-the-dribble, rise-up guy. A Kyle Korver type, that wasn’t who he was,” Brown said. “He was a wiggly, do-what-he-wants-to guard. So you go back and you say, ‘How can you find that again?'”
The Sixers still haven’t addressed just when this problem started, nor why they felt it prudent to make a clearly hobbled Fultz run through shooting drills left-handed. Now we’re left wondering what went wrong, and whether it can be fixed, all for a player who went #1 overall, and looked fine shooting as recently as Summer League:
[ESPN]
