As you said, it makes sense if he's hurt. Shut him down sixers! This is kinda unreal from a team as conservative as the sixers, their core is still so young.
They can't really shut him down unless he admits he's injured, right? And so far as I understand, he's saying he's not hurt, right?
He admits to soreness but nothing of the type that would prevent him from shooting a jump shot.
And going into the draft, one of the biggest questions about Markelle Fultz was his temperament and how he might shy away from the spotlight. There is no bigger spotlight than the FT line.
The lack of 3 point attempts seems especially odd to me if he's healthy. He passed up some open looks against the Celtics, it makes some kind of sense that he has some ailment making it too hard to launch shots from that distance (either sapping his strength or limiting his range of motion) so he doesn't even try. How bad would the yips have to be if he is healthy but just not taking them, at all?
You already answered your own question with video proof unless it actually is injury related.
Dude missed a FT by 2 feet. Maybe he doesn't want to kill a grandma sitting in the 3rd row by donking her off the head.
This has to be the most severe basketball case of the yips I've seen from a good shooter since Otis Birdsong at the line in his New Jersey Nets days. If a shoulder injury was this severe to cause him to alter his form there is no way he would have been cleared by the medical staff to play or his agent/team would allow him to play. How does Ainge have whatever information he had about Fultz but Philly did not? Crazy in this day and age of information.
Of course. I was just poking fun of the thought of someone taking freethrows in an actual pickup game. I have had someone try that and found it comical when he asked for the ball at the FT line
I don't know your age but waaaaay back in the day if there were less than 5 guys playing the winner you'd have players from the losing team line up to take FT's to fill out the next team.
I had some tricks. We'd always take the shots from the line but if I was competing against bigs or non-shooters I'd "suggest" that we take the second round from three.....ya know, to help speed up the game. It worked like a charm.
You never had refs at your pickup games? And scorers and uniforms and cheerleaders? You must have been deprived when you were young.
I don't know if I agree with this. Remember - Fultz played against Ball and UCLA, and then sat the name game because of "knee soreness". At that point, he was listed as day-to-day.
That sequence seems strange at the time too. Fultz had played 38 minutes in the UCLA game. In his first game back he returned to the locker room at least once in the first half (I want to say he left game in second half to do same but honestly I don't recall for sure), played 38 minutes two days later then was shut down for the year. He never once left the floor in distress or with any limp/sign of injury. It was bizarre at the time and even more so now.
Because he says it's the reason for the changes, and the sixers have not disagreed.
Mentally unstable? Really?
I don't know, do you think this was predictable?
As a millennial that plays frequently the standard has always been to shoot free throws to fill the open spots. If a couple guys make three or four free throws in a row; then it is customary to move to threes.
This is interesting. I wasn't sold on Fultz due to his lack of explosiveness and in these early games he hasn't struggled getting his shot off on penetration in the paint. In college he never showed an inability to shoot as that was one of his strengths. He has yet to take a jumper from outside of 14 feet as a pro.
Remember Fultz's summer league performance against the Jazz in SLC? Of the 16 shots he made, 8 were from 3P Land and he made four of them. He didn't have any difficulty shooting then and it is unclear what could have happened between now and then that would have lead to the current state of affairs.
There was some talk of him not being an elite shooter, based on ft%. I don't remember anyone hinting at the mess that he is now.
