Markelle Fultz is not a lost cause yet

The Sixers must continue to focus on making a leap into the elites, but what will their fast-paced improvement mean for Markelle Fultz?

Sixers prospect Markelle Fultz is far from a lost cause, despite the belief of many after a very shaky start to his career, and an up and down battle through the first month of the 2018-19 season. Fultz didn’t come out shooting the lights off the ceiling of the Wells Fargo Center by any means, but he’s been far from a disaster.

In fact, you could say he looks like an inexperienced guard that has failed to find any successful consistency. Surely, confidence (or lack thereof) has been a central theme in many discussions about the former first pick that the Sixers traded with their arch-rivals. There’s been times where Fultz allows defenders to sag 10-feet off of him, as he clutches the ball nervously around the perimeter. But there are also times where you see him failing to hide a smile after a roaring crowd cheers on his open corner three, or a mid-range pull-up.

Fultz, just 20-years of age, is a kid. Despite the monikers of “the next James Harden” pre-draft, or utter bust just months after, he is simply someone looking to find growth both on and off the court. It’s reasonable to see why the Sixers might have a shorter leash for Fultz than prospects in the past, however.

The team is looking to compete with a star-riddled top-heavy Eastern Conference that lays claim to at least two teams ahead of them in terms of championship potential. While they proudly bolster two of the best young players in the league in the form of Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid, they are far from complete. That’s where the blame points to Fultz.

Before we get into dynamics of team expectations, let’s diagnose the handful of performances we’ve seen from the young DeMatha product this season. In a slog of a home opener, Markelle Fultz may have played his worst game in the NBA season opener in Boston. With high expectations coming off of Drew Hanlen videos and a promising preseason, Fultz, and the rest of the Sixers, came off sluggish. Fultz shot just 2 for 7 from the field, securing just five points, three rebounds, two assists, and three turnovers.

Fultz, like in many games this season, has struggled to find a rhythm offensively, and takes out his frustrations defensively. Through the first three games of the season, Fultz averaged 8.3 points, 4.7 assists, and 3.7 rebounds. While the base stats don’t seem horrible, Fultz wasn’t effective enough to be a main factor throughout the game.

Fultz earned the starting lineup, but still working to get Brett Brown’s trust

It wasn’t until the Sixers took on the Detroit Pistons without primary floor general Ben Simmons, where Fultz found the confidence needed to make him a scoring threat. As he dropped 11 points on five of eight shooting through the first three quarters, the Sixers stormed to a seven-point lead, temporarily curtailing the impact of Blake Griffin’s stellar performance. As the Pistons stormed back to an eventual overtime win, Fultz saw just less than two minutes of play, coming early in the fourth quarter.

In college, Fultz was known as a primary ball handler who could attack defenses in multitudes of ways. Driving to the rim while finishing around contact, pulling up for consistent threes, and drawing defenders to himself while still being able to find teammates open along the wing. With the Sixers, however, his role is to become the complementary shooter and secondary ball handler to Simmons.

So, when Fultz’s best game came with Simmons out of the lineup, it shouldn’t have been that surprising to those who followed the former throughout his short college and NBA career thus far. His confidence skyrocketed each time the ball was in his hands, as he showed glimpses of the player he was touted to be, rising up and shooting over the Pistons’ defense.

Not that the duo of Simmons and Fultz can’t work, but through the minimal games they played together the past two seasons, the Sixers offensive rating dropped to just 101.48 with both of them off the court. The defensive rating, however, has been an impressive 97.16. The duo does have the shown length and effort to be an effective defensive backcourt, but the lack of shooting between the two has been restricting the Sixers from being an efficient offensive unit.

Sixers
(via bball-index)

While it was a deflating loss in Detroit for the Sixers, who controlled the scoreboard for much of the game, it was difficult not to reactively question head coach Brett Brown’s decision to restrict the hot hand to a minimal amount of playing time. It’s easy to see why he’d want to play TJ McConnell in key situations when Simmons is absent, as the scrappy guard is known to make key hustle plays in late game situations. Even then, Fultz should have at the least seen more playing time than he did.

This is where the broken intersection of Fultz’s development and the Sixers’ desire to get a more realistic taste in the hunt of a championship will ultimately decide his fate. Brown, after years of developing the team through a rigorous rebuild, is far from shy about his desire to push this team to contention. While his star-hunting summer failed to pan out, the hope lied within Fultz to regain the potential out of his sole season at Washington.

The first sense is that Brown will be patient in committing full trust into Fultz, despite putting him in the starting lineup in every night through the first month of games. With the play of J.J. Redick lifting the Sixers offense significantly off the bench, it’s no surprise to see him inserted into the lineup almost permanently by the second half of games. One may ask what exactly Fultz needs to show to see continuous second half minutes, possibly taking a chunk of a struggling Dario Saric’s minutes late in games.

One may also ask, what is the timetable the new Sixers front office is willing to layout for the now shaky prospect. Will the insatiable hunger for a championship mean shipping Fultz off for a high-caliber third piece that can expand the potential of this promising core. With talks of trading for Jimmy Butler getting some traction due to a blurb from The Athletic’s Shams Charania in an interview about the trade saga, and Fultz inconsistent play, there seems to be at least an assumed inkling of thought in shipping the second-year guard.

Markelle Fultz hasn’t yet panned out to being the final piece to a long puzzle, but his play has at the least showed he can grow into an effective player of some sorts. This isn’t a reincarnation of the Jahlil Okafor situation, but it does warrant expected hesitation. Patience is what should be the central theme for the relationship between the Sixers and Fultz, but patience may be thinning out for a team moving at a pace that may be too fast for the currently struggling player.

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