After an embarrassing rookie season, Markelle Fultz is back with a reworked jump shot, and it looks good.
The Players’ Tribune released a video of the 2017 number one pick, showcasing his new jumper that he had to rebuild due to a shoulder injury that sidelined him for 68 games last season.
Fultz is coming off a rookie season to forget in which he not only missed most of the season but when he played he only scored 7.1 points per game, nothing compared to the 23.4 points the Sixers’ player averaged in College.
RELATED: MARKELLE FULTZ READY TO BE AN ALL STAR AFTER SEASON TO FORGET
Fultz’s jump shot had to be fixed since, according to his trainer Drew Hanlen, the Washington product had a case of “the yips” in his rookie season—where an athlete forgets how to do simple tasks.
"With Markelle, obviously, he had one of the most documented case of kind of the yips of basketball in recent years," Hanlen said on June, "where he completely forgot how to shoot and had multiple hitches in his shot."
“We’ve been working hard every day, working on rewiring his body and getting a kind of smooth stroke back into his shot."
The mechanics of Fultz’s jump-shot looks much better, smoother than how it looked when he came back from his injury.
The footage of the 20-year-old that The Players’ Tribune posted was only a clip of a longer video where Fultz talked with Isaiah Thomas about his recovery process.
"There was a lot of things going about changing shots and all this, but there was an injury there," Fultz said. "For me, I'm a hooper so I was like ‘this ain't going to stop me.' Once I realized I really couldn't do stuff to my full capacity, I was like ‘it really is something' so I had to find out what it was, and we did that throughout the season.”
When Markelle Fultz started to miss a lot of games last season, this prompted a lot of people to believe that there was something else other than the injury that was impeding him to play.
“People really didn’t understand, they thought ‘man, he’s just being soft,’ but it was really an injury. And now I got a chance to just sit down and pick apart all these doctors. We figured it out, and I’ve been back to work this summer.”
If Fultz’s jumper is actually fixed, and he can play as good as he was as a freshman in Washington, the Boston Celtics should be careful. Because any team with Joel Embiid, Ben Simmons, and a healthy Markelle Fultz are strong contenders to win the Eastern Conference. However, with no desire to discourage Sixers’ fans, all of the shots in the video were off the catch, we still need to see him shooting them off of the dribble and in real game situations.