'He's going to figure it out': The 76ers try to strike a balance with Markelle Fultz

BOSTON — Philadelphia 76ers guard Markelle Fultz is facing the music.

After another loss to the Boston Celtics at the hands of Jayson Tatum on Tuesday, the 2017 No. 1 pick bounced around the locker room with bluetooth headphones in his ears. He joked with trainers before taking a couple questions about a game that saw him finish 2-for-7 from the field and record more turnovers than assists before being all but benched in the second half.

“When coach makes a decision that he believes is best, I’m perfectly fine with it,” said Fultz. “You grow by sitting on the bench and watching, too. If anything, you see what players on the court can’t see.”

It was the sort of game that may have sent Fultz retreating into his locker last season, staring at his phone in hopes of avoiding another round of questions from media wondering how and why the scapular muscle imbalance in his right shoulder led him to, as trainer Drew Hanlen described in June, “completely [forget] how to shoot.”

Fultz’s shot still hasn’t returned to the level that made him a versatile scoring threat and the consensus top pick at the University of Washington. That’s still a work in progress, but his coach, teammates and shot doctor are all confident he can get back there, and they’re investing heavily in him this season, if only because they need him in order to get where they’d like to go.

“He seems more confident,” teammate J.J. Redick told Yahoo Sports. “I think his demeanor, his spirit has changed. I think he wasn’t sure — and I don’t think any of us were sure — what was happening last year. I don’t think he even knew what was happening last year. I think it’s balancing the NBA as a 19-year-old, the pressure of being the No. 1 draft pick is tough on anyone, and then you add an injury on top of that, and it’s tough. I think he’s got his body in a great place and he’s ready to go this season.”

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Every time the Sixers opened the curtain on practice last season, a horde of reporters readied their cell phones to capture glimpses of Fultz’s broken jump shot, and the resulting six-second clips were analyzed on social media and talking-head shows more times than the Zapruder film.

“The kid’s f—ing 19, man,” Redick warned reporters at one such practice. “Holy s—. Y’all are sick.”

Expounding on that anger in a podcast interview with ESPN’s Zach Lowe over the summer, Redick likened the process by which the media picked apart Fultz’s faulty jumper to “vultures preying on a dying, decaying body.” On top of the physical and mental hurdles of overcoming “one of the most documented cases of the yips in basketball in recent years,” Fultz’s phone was filled with constant reminders of his failure to immediately fulfill the hype that follows a No. 1 pick.

Part of what made Redick so upset about the attention paid to the shoulder and shooting woes that cost Fultz all but 14 games last season is the knowledge that social media — a vice he called “a dark place” and “f—ing scary” in an eye-opening feature from Bleacher Report’s Tom Haberstroh — adds yet another layer to the many challenges that come with being a teenager in the basketball limelight.

“If there was social media when I was at Duke, I think I would’ve not made it through my career. My career probably would’ve ended prematurely due to suspension,” Redick half-joked to Yahoo Sports, as a Sixers employee reminded him that MySpace launched in 2003. The extent of Redick’s social media access at Fultz’s age was a fledgling Facebook account his Duke.edu address got him as a junior.

“There wasn’t Instagram when I came in, so we didn’t have to worry about that,” added Sixers veteran Amir Johnson, who owns the distinction of being the last player drafted from high school to the NBA. “Nowadays, it’s different. Everybody puts their phone out when something happens. This day and age, you’ve really got to stay level-headed and ignore it, especially as a rookie.”

It’s a wonder the only mention of any anxiety came in a short-lived post on Fultz’s Instagram feed.

“‘Faithful to the grind’ is his slogan, and he does that. Every day,” Johnson added after the season-opening 103-85 loss. “He’s always positive, always in the gym working, coming in early, staying late. That’s what I told him: ‘They can’t take away how hard you work.’ And it shows.

“I’m super proud of him for going through a season, being the No. 1 pick, working hard, coming back and being better. That’s all you can ask. He’s a great guy who was in that limelight where everybody was smashing him. He used it as fuel, worked hard, and now he’s back stronger.”

After the team flight back to Philadelphia, Ben Simmons posted video of Fultz shooting in the gym at 2 a.m. “F2G,” shorthand for Fultz’s slogan, is tattooed on his left leg, along with this Bible scripture: “Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”

“He’s going to figure it out,” Hanlen, Fultz’s shot architect, said in a text to Yahoo Sports. “He’s come a long way. Worked harder than anyone I’ve ever had before to get back. It’ll come. Just takes time.”

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Fultz recognizes it takes more than slogans and Instagram posts to get back to the player the 76ers need him to be — a dynamic athlete with a 6-foot-9 wingspan who scores from all three levels, disrupts defensively and serves as the perfect complement to Simmons, a visionary point forward with his own shooting concerns — and the team is trying to strike a balance between granting the second-year guard that time and needing him to help the team now.

Everything the 76ers are doing with Fultz is designed to rebuild his confidence. They shelved him for almost all of last season, brought him back for the stretch run, which culminated in his triple-double against the Milwaukee Bucks reserves, and sidelined him again in playoff games that mattered against the Celtics. After a summer spent practicing his reconstructed shot with Hanlen, the Sixers named Fultz their starting two-guard, with the caveat that Redick would take his place to start second halves.

You can hear the encouragement in the voices of veterans who also find themselves trying to find a balance between advising their promising teammate and letting him find his own way.

“I kind of take the approach of the vets that I respected and had an impact on me, which was they verbalized and they let me know that they were available,” Redick told Yahoo Sports. “That’s really all you can do. The situation with Markelle last year, there was a lot of people involved, a lot of people who were offering advice, and some were soliciting, trying to be a part of that process, and I didn’t want to step on anybody’s toes. I also didn’t want to overwhelm him, so I just let him know I was there for him and if he ever needed to chat or anything, but also that I supported him and had his back.”

Fultz opened himself up to Redick’s advice, and it’s clear from everyone around the 20-year-old that they’re genuinely rooting for the kid, because they’ve seen how hard he’s worked to get back to good. Never was that more evident than when everyone inside Wells Fargo Center — from teammates on the bench to Hanlen in the front row to fans in the cheap seats — erupted as Fultz finally made the first 3-pointer of his professional career early in the preseason.

Even Tatum, drafted two spots behind Fultz after the draft-day trade that sent his No. 3 pick and the Sacramento Kings’ top-one protected 2019 first-round pick to the Celtics, can’t help but feel for Fultz.

“I was happy to see him out there,” Tatum, one of countless NBA players who worked alongside Fultz with Hanlen this summer, told reporters after the opener. “It’s been a tough journey for him the last year, so just to see him back playing basketball, I know that has to be a great feeling.”

***

These shots of encouragement can sometimes sound like coddling in the cutthroat world of professional sports, where ferocious opponents will use any sign of weakness against you. The difference in development between Tatum and Fultz in the first game of their sophomore seasons was striking. Tatum scored in myriad ways, drawing comparisons to Kobe Bryant, and Fultz still hesitated to shoot from the outside, leading the vultures to start circling once again.

For the one pull-up jumper Fultz made from 13 feet on Tuesday, there were several occasions when he passed up open looks from deep for tougher ones closer to the basket and even more instances when he was just sort of there, waiting in the wings as his teammates did their thing.

Fultz learned quickly that all those encouraging words go out the window once he steps between the lines. Marcus Smart isn’t coddling him on the court. Fultz played all but three minutes in the first half, and then only three in the second, when coach Brett Brown abandoned his plan to get Fultz as many minutes as possible at the point in favor of playing T.J. McConnell.

“Markelle is going to have steady, slow growth,” said Brown. “Sometimes he’s going to be just incredible. Other times he’s going to be part of the NBA at a very young age on a pretty good team.”

We should all caution ourselves against judging Fultz based on his first game following a long layoff.

“We live in a day where everyone wants instant results and truth is it takes time,” Hanlen texted Yahoo Sports. “He sat out for a year. You saw how much Kyrie [Irving] struggled. Does that mean Kyrie isn’t good? No. It means it’s going to take a little for him to catch his rhythm. Same thing with Markelle. If you take a step back and look at things, he went from not getting into the game to starting. That’s a big improvement. He passed up some shots that he will take, but it was his first game back.”

At the same time, the 76ers need that steady growth to bear fruit by the playoffs, because if we learned anything from the opener, it’s that just getting Fultz back to good isn’t good enough.

***

After Tuesday’s loss, multiple Sixers acknowledged the palpable void left by Marco Belinelli and Ersan Ilyasova, a pair of floor-stretching vets whose February arrivals last season preceded a 15-game win streak to close the regular season and a first-round shellacking of the Miami Heat.

“They were huge for us,” Redick told Yahoo Sports. “The other thing, too, they were vets. Those guys had been in playoff battles. Marco won a championship. So, there was a savviness to both of them.”

Five-man units featuring Belinelli or Ilyasova outscored opponents at a rate that would rival the league’s most dominant teams if projected over a full season, and lineups with both of them owned a positive net rating of 15.3 points per 100 possessions, thanks to the space they provided for young Sixers stars Simmons and Joel Embiid to attack and post up around the basket.

The Sixers are hopeful that the additions of Wilson Chandler and Mike Muscala, who missed the opener with hamstring and ankle injuries, as well as the arrival of sharpshooting first-round pick Landry Shamet, can offset the losses of Belinelli and Ilyasova, especially after seeing the Celtics sag off their wealth of non-shooting perimeter players to make life miserable for Embiid.

“We have a chance to play different lineups this year once Wilson gets healthy,” added Redick. “I think Landry is going to be big for us, but we’re not robots. You can’t just swap a guy for a guy and expect to get the same result, but I think we have some flexibility with shooting once Mike and Wilson get healthy and once Landry gets in a rhythm. He’s going to be a fantastic player.”

Embiid lamented the roster shakeup and changes to the starting lineup after Tuesday’s loss, saying “we’ve got to figure this out.” Johnson offered this advice: “You find different ways to use the players we have. When we had [Belinelli and Ilyasova], we used them to the best of our ability. … If we get trades, if we get different players, we work to our best strengths.” And newly hired general manager Elton Brand readily acknowledged his team needs another piece.

Behind this is the elephant in the room. Fultz was drafted to complete a three-headed monster that already features Simmons and Embiid playing shoulders above their peers. Fultz’s ability to play on or off the ball was supposed to pair perfectly with Simmons when they shared the court and add another playmaking dynamic when the reigning Rookie of the Year goes to the bench.

The reality is that the Sixers weren’t good enough to beat an undermanned Celtics team even with Belinelli and Ilyasova, and they need Fultz to split the difference. Eventually, his rebuilt shot has to follow through on his rebuilt confidence into results. The Sixers can’t whiff on a No. 1 pick, especially with another lottery pick likely headed to Boston as a result. The vultures aren’t going away anytime soon, but there has to be a decaying body upon which to prey. Fultz and his confidence-building support system, faithful to the grind, are working to ensure there isn’t one.

Still, the music won’t stop while Fultz searches for his rhythm.

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Ben Rohrbach is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach

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