The Recent History of the Philadelphia 76ers, or: The Basketball Gods are Real and they are Angry, part 2: A Tale of Two Fluids
In 2017, the Sixers had the first pick in the NBA draft for the second year running. Bryan Colangelo orchestrated a trade to move up in the draft, spending some of the war chest of picks that Hinkie had accumulated over the years.
Hinkie's strategy of accumulating as many lottery picks as possible had, to all onlookers, succeeded. The Sixers had picked in the top three in the draft for the fourth year straight. Sure, Jahlil Okafor had proved disappointing. But Joel Embiid had shown himself to be as great as advertised, although his first season was shortened by injury. And Ben Simmons was yet to make his debuts, also due to injury; expectations were high. With this final high-end pick, the Sixers selected Markelle Fultz.
Now, a player's skills at the college level don't always translate in the NBA. The game is faster, the players are on average bigger. But shooting tends to translate more consistently than most things. If a college player is regularly shooting perfect rainbows over taller defenders, it's a decent bet that he'll be able to shoot in the NBA. And Fultz was above all else a shooter. He was a great shooter in college, a mobile guard who could shoot it from anywhere on the floor and who did it off the dribble, creating his own shot. This type of player is at a premium in the NBA, and while Fultz was not the universal consensus first pick, he was a very reasonable one for Philadelphia. The draft him, they sign him, everything seems fine.
Weeks pass. Summer league comes. If you're unfamiliar, summer league is a short tournament played in Las Vegas where NBA teams field basically just rookies, some second-year players, and marginal players hoping to showcase enough to get roster spots. It's a preview of the new young players coming into the league, basically. Markelle, like other top rookies, players in summer league and he's great there. Everyone's happy.
A couple more months pass. The NBA starts playing full preseason games. And soon it becomes apparent that something is profoundly wrong.
When he gets to the free throw line, his form looks broken; he brings the ball up over his forehead, hitches for a split second, then pushes up the ball vaguely towards the hoop. Concern and questions start mounting. Is he playing through a shoulder injury? Is he trying to change his shot for some reason? Did he forget how to shoot free throws?
Above all, is this also affecting his jump shot? It's impossible to tell because he refuses to take jump shots. He passes up open shots. He doesn't attempt a single three, even though he was a 41% three-point shooter in college and nearly half of his attempts came from outside the arc.
Rumors swirl. His agent claims he had fluid taken out of his shoulder. Days later he changes his mind and says he had a cortisone shot put into his shoulder. Speculation mounts that he has psychosomatic issues (something that Fultz himself vehemently denies, then and later). Bryan Colangelo insinuates that the injury was caused by working with a private coach to try and change his own shooting form. A few games into the regular season, the team shuts him down to evaluate a possible shoulder injury. In four regular season games, he hasn't attempted a single three point shot.
To anyone watching, it looks like he's forgotten how to shoot. Nobody has seen anything like it before; it's haunting to watch. Even a casual watcher can see that his form is broken, that the way he's shooting the basketball is just clearly not conducive to accuracy.
He comes back late in the season and shows some flashes of his old self, then regresses again. He's benched for basically the entire playoffs.
Fultz returns to the starting lineup in the 2018-19 season. At this point, his jump shot and free throw look utterly broken, nonsensical even. He shoots a wide open corner three out of balance, with his hand not centered over his head. He hitches in the middle of shooting a free throw. He's doing all this on one of the most scrutinized teams in the league. Lowlights edits of him circulate. An NFL player mocks his confusing new free throw shooting form in a touchdown celebration. The Sixers eventually trade him to Orlando early in the season.
Much was made of Fultz' emotional state, his relationship to the team, his relationship to his own family and trainers. But the explanation Fultz himself will eventually land on for what happened to him is thoracic outlet syndrome: a hard to diagnose nerve injury that is almost unheard of in basketball. In Orlando, he'll gradually recover his shooting, even though (as of last season), he's still nowhere near the dynamic scorer he was in college.
Markelle Fultz' story is one of the most nightmarish injury stories in NBA history. It's like watching someone else's anxiety dream, the one where you show up to a calculus test only to find that a malicious demon has rearranged all the numbers and nothing you've studied makes any sense. Lots of figures in the Process saga are unsympathetic; here's a craven team owner, here's an arrogant general manager. Markelle Fultz isn't that. Fultz is a kid who had enormous pressure placed on him, and then misfortune struck him at the worst imaginable time in the most inexplicable way possible. Few things contributed more to the overarching sense that these Sixers were vaguely cursed, that suffering was just in the cards for them.