Mike Writes About Markelle Fultz

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MIKE'S CORNER - MARKELLE'S RETURN
 

New to the Corner Three Newsletter: every week Spike or Mike will write a section, aptly titled Spike's Corner or Mike's Corner. Mike is kicking it off, writing about Markelle Fultz.
 

This week, Markelle Fultz played his first game in Philadelphia since they traded him to Orlando in the great Painful Burning Sensation Of Watching Jonathon Simmons On Your Team trade of 2019, which was later renamed the Thank You Mike Muscala Despite Your Dad trade once the protected OKC pick conveyed. While Tyrese Maxey has taken some of the sting off, the word “Markelle” still sends me to the Dead Marshes of Middle-Earth. But since the Sixers just finished up a 2-game stint against the feisty Magic (play-in bound! maybe!), let’s talk about Markelle.

It’s pretty surreal that he’s just a regular NBA player. On both ends of the spectrum. He’s not Ja Morant with defense, or Brandon Roy with knees, or shorter, less iconically cool Tracy McGrady, the way he looked like he could’ve been as a prospect. But he’s also not a top pick flameout. He had one of the strangest things happen to him that’s ever happened to, or with, or about, a highly touted player at that stage of his career. And six years into his career (deep breath to consider the ruthlessness of the passage of time) he’s the starting point guard on the Magic. He’s pretty good. He defends, he gets to the rim, he finds open guys. He shoots sometimes. They play about .500 ball when he’s out there. Normal shit.

But I can’t think about him like that. I can’t extract him from the narrative that surrounds him. He’s always going to be Markelle… because of the love & loss & still unresolved drama that came with his 2ish years here. It’s a Sixers thing, which is very different from A Philly Thing. And the way the national media — due to a lack of context, and laziness, and how easy it is to blame things on Philadelphia sports fans, and how the other Shooting Problem played out —has coalesced around the fiction that Markelle was done dirty here. He wasn’t. We know he wasn’t. We remember Brett starting him over JJ Redick when there was no basketball reason to do so. We remember the Pat-Bev-Cry-Celebrating-In-Minnesota-After-Winning-A-Play-In-Game-level jubilation at The Center when Markelle got a triple double in the last regular season game of his rookie year. We remember writing him a cloying Get Well card that he held up appreciatively! As much as I root for Markelle as a player I once really believed in, you don’t want to see your ex that happy, especially when the media is blaming you for the breakup. This metaphor doesn't work.

The picks swapped. Bryan Colangelo gave up the house for a guy Danny Ainge didn’t want. And the last 5+ years of The Sixers Science Fiction Soap Opera Government Experiment would have looked a lot different in a multitude of strange ways if Markelle Fultz was just the dude we took #1. He wasn’t. He played 37 total games in Philadelphia. And even though he’s relatively normal, as are the Sixers kind of, it’ll never be normal to me dammit.

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