Brown will take his best shot at solving Fultz mystery

PHILADELPHIA » Brett Brown is 56, has coached everywhere, has won titles, has lost games, has coached Hall of Famers, has coached through a process that has been a little touchy.

Somewhere in that journey, he might have seen something, anything, like he has this season with Markelle Fultz. Guess again. “I’m old,” Brown said Monday, before coaching the Sixers against the Raptors. “And I’ve never experienced anything like this. I really haven’t.”

No one was arguing. For who has seen anything like a disintegration of a once-prized prospect’s shooting form that has become so drastic that videos of him shooting on his own routinely go viral?

Basically, Fultz has forgotten how to shoot. And Brown was quoted the other day as saying the rookie would play only when he remembers how to shoot.

The combo guard shot well enough in his one season at the University of Washington, and then in whatever scouting opportunities he had afterward, to be the consensus choice as the No. 1 overall pick in the last draft. But then he showed up to start the season, sporting an inside-out free-throw style and cockeyed form on deeper shots.

The Sixers have suggested that Fultz suffers from (their term) scapular muscle imbalance in his right shoulder. They have been trying to correct that since the fourth game of the season. More recently, though, they have sighed that Fultz essentially is healthy … and that is his shot alone that belongs on the critical list.

“None of us can discount the fact that his shoulder has a story to be told in this,” Brown said. “And we’re all going to sit back and guess their percentages. But none of us can discount that you can go from one thing to another. It’s not fair to suggest that it can’t be connected.”

Even with Brown, however, still striving to make a connection between the crooked shoulder and the more crooked shot, he said there has been no internal discussion about surgery. Unless that changes, the only thing that will require an operation, then, is the shot itself.

“I think the first thing we have to do is get back to how he shot,” he said. “That’s home plate to me. I’m a shooting coach at heart. I am the son of a coach. I have a 13-yearold who can shoot. I lived with Chip Engelland in San Antonio, the NBA’s best shooting coach. And down deep, it interests me probably more than any part of the game.

“When you start looking at what he did and his free throws, he’s a rise-up guy, a live-ball, off-thedribble rise-up guy,” Brown added. “Loading up and being a Kyle Korver guy? That’s not what he was. He was a wiggly, do-what-he-wants-to guard. So you go back and say, ‘How do you find that again, whether it is as a free-throw shooter, whether it is as a rise-up-because-I’m-65-and-you’re-not point guard or whatever?’

“How do we find what he was? That’s what I am most interested in now. As far as taking that and moving a hand and a release point or something like that, we’ll take care of that after we find home plate.” So Brown will take his hacks. “I think that you continue to spend time with him,” he said. “Only recently has he been allowed to come in and practice. He has been doing some shooting prior to that. It’s a matter of investing time. I will be spending more time with him personally now that he is a bit more available to us and me.

“I just want to spend private time with him and help him. That is my main mission. We all want stuff yesterday. We, I and the organization will help him reclaim why he was the first person chosen in the NBA draft.”