Yesterday afternoon the Sixers announced their decision to sit down Markelle Fultz, who will miss at least three games because of a sore shoulder which has prevented the rookie guard from shooting from the perimeter.

He will be reevaluated Tuesday, according to the team.

Fultz averaged just 6.0 points on 33.3 percent shooting from the field during the first four games of the season before being shut down, with none of his field-goal attempts coming from more than 15 feet from the basket. That’s a drastic departure from how he played in high school and at Washington, where he lived on not only three-point shots, but also pull-up jumpers in traffic. In fact, over 43 percent of his half-court field goal attempts came from 17+ feet from the basket last year, according to Synergy Sports. He went from embracing tough jump shots to avoiding them altogether.

Something, whether that be his confidence or his health, was wrong. That’s been clear since training camp.

What do we know? What do we think we know? And what information is being contradicted by the various factions involved in this increasingly convoluted and confusing saga?

What we know

Fultz received a cortisone shot on October 5

As part of his treatment to play through the shoulder soreness, Fultz received a cortisone shot on October 5. This has been confirmed by both Fultz’s agent, Raymond Brothers, and the team.

Even this — what one would assume is the most basic, straightforward fact of this entire ordeal — has received some level of controversy. Originally ESPN quoted Fultz’s agent on Tuesday night saying Fultz had fluid drained from his shoulder. “Markelle had a shoulder injury and fluid drained out of the back of his shoulder,” Brothers told ESPN, a claim which has now been corrected in the story.

Brothers later clarified that Fultz received a cortisone shot, meaning that fluid was put into his shoulder, not taken out. This version of events was later confirmed to The Athletic by team officials, and discussed by Bryan Colangelo to reporters on Wednesday afternoon.

October 5 was the day after the Sixers’ preseason opener against the Memphis Grizzlies, a game in which Fultz played. He then missed the October 6 preseason game against Boston because of shoulder soreness, a decision which at the time head coach Brett Brown called precautionary.

“It is [precautionary]. It’s not anything we expect to linger. It’s something that we want to get on top of. My intention for most of the guys is to give them probably one game off,” Brown explained at the time. “If tonight is Markelle’s then so be it. We hope to see him in Boston.”

The Sixers did see Fultz play in the next game, an October 9 contest with the Celtics in Boston, but that was the last time he would play in the preseason. He missed both the October 11 game against the Nets and the October 13 game against the Heat because of right knee and right shoulder soreness, according to the team.

The injury is impacting Fultz’s ability to shoot

Every party involved — Fultz’s agent, his personal trainer and the 76ers — has agreed that Fultz’s shoulder soreness has contributed to his unwillingness, and inability, to shoot from the perimeter.

“He literally cannot raise up his arms to shoot the basketball,” Brothers told ESPN.

“Once you get to the point where you feel some discomfort, you try to work away from it,” Keith Williams, Fultz’s longtime personal trainer, told 94 WIP. “I think that’s why he had a weird motion where his shot is kind of out. It’s out because that’s away from the pain.”

“Obviously, his shot mechanics have been affected by whatever’s going on [with his shoulder],” Colangelo told the media yesterday, although he hedged it by including “Whatever came first”, a reference to speculation put forth by Colangelo that the changing shot mechanics could have actually played a role in contributing to the pain Fultz has been experiencing. More on that below.

Finally, Brown has acknowledged Fultz’s sore shoulder. “You could feel that he just wasn’t 100 percent. I’ve been saying that for a while now,” Brown said yesterday.

There appears to be no structural damage in Fultz’s shoulder

“There was no medical reason not to play him. He was cleared to play, and he wanted to play. So that’s why he was playing,” Colangelo said yesterday. “He was medically cleared and dealing with ongoing discomfort, and it was his choice to continue playing through the pain.

“There’s no structural damage at all,” Colangelo continued.

Fultz’s camp agrees.

“Looking back maybe we shouldn’t have [tried to play through the injury], but that’s his love,” Williams told WIP. “I think he wanted to play, wanted to help the team, and I ultimately I think he thought, as per usual, he could play through it and get back to his normal self. Because there was improvement.”

Williams went on to say that surgery has not been discussed.

Does that mean Fultz should have been playing through the pain? That’s a different question than whether there’s any structural damage. Once it became obvious that Fultz was unwilling, unable, or both, to shoot from the perimeter, it benefited neither the team nor Fultz himself to continue to play when he had no chance of success. Fultz may have wanted to continue to play, but the team should have stepped in.

The contradicting stories

Did Fultz tweak his shot over the summer?

One of the big takeaways from training camp was “Woah, what in the heck happened to Markelle Fultz’s jump shot?” It’s something the media began to talk about long before a possible shoulder injury was publicly revealed.

This was first brought up to Brown on September 28, the third day of training camp. At the time, Brown was pretty adamant that Fultz made changes to his shot, on his own over the summer, with no mention of the injury being a contributing factor in the decision to make those changes.

“Markelle has made some personal adjustments to his shot since we last saw him in Vegas,” Brown explained at the time. “He’s been with his personal trainer over the month of August and since summer league ended, and he chose to look at some different things on his shot.

“[It’s] maybe sort of making over something that didn’t need to be made over as much as he might have thought,” Brown went on to say.

Fultz, at the time, said he was just experimenting.

“I wanted to try something new. But my free-throw is going to look the same as college,” Fultz explained, saying he would eventually revert his form. “I’m just trying to look at different ways to see how the ball can go in the hoop.

Fultz then explained that he had made adjustments to his shot since the draft.

“A little bit,” Fultz said when asked whether he’d made adjustments. “Just trying to get ready to catch and shoot. You know, this is a further three.”

The questions continued two days later when the Sixers held a scrimmage at the Palestra on October 1. Once again, Brown reiterated that Fultz made changes that weren’t sanctioned by the team, that needed to be reverted, and made no mention of the shoulder being a factor.

“No. No. And so we’re going to get back on track,” Brown said when asked whether he was comfortable with the changes Fultz made to his shot. “All by himself he pivoted out over the summer and tried to make it better and tweak it. He’s in a place right now where we’re going to try to remind him of where his shot was, and try to bring that back into probably more of a tighter shot, bring his release point down a little bit, bring the ball closer to his body.”

The following day, October 2, Brown said he thought people were reading too much into Fultz’s shot as he tried to quell the developing controversy.

“Yeah, everybody’s looking into it. It’s shocking to me. He’s a young guy that’s trying to come into the league and make improvements,” Brown said when asked on October 3 about the attention Fultz’s shot was receiving. “I feel like all the guys have had issues with trying to grow their game, and developing Markelle for me is obviously huge, and we will continue to work on his shot.”

Yesterday, Fultz’s trainer told WIP that there was no intention to alter his shooting motion. Instead, Fultz was just reacting to, and trying to work around, his shoulder soreness.

“It had nothing to do with a changed shot,” Williams said. “Why would somebody who shot so well, why would he change his shot?”

“That’s not a changed shot, that’s a messed-up shot,” Williams added. “That ain’t worth talking about. That’s not how anybody would change his shot. You can’t even pick another player that you think shoots like that.”

Yet, even through yesterday afternoon, the Sixers continued to state that Fultz attempted to change his shooting mechanics over the offseason.

“Sometime during the month of August, I think, he might have worked on his shot a little bit,” Colangelo said Wednesday. He then seemingly echoed Williams’ surprise over why a shooter of Fultz’s caliber would even consider changing his shot. “It’s generally not normal for a guy to average 24 points a game in college, and shoot over 40 percent from three, and then change mechanics.”

Brown was even more direct when asked whether Fultz made it a priority to change his mechanics, doubling down on his comments from training camp.

“There is zero doubt that Markelle, in goodness in his heart, in trying to do the right thing, tried to readjust his shot,” Brown said yesterday — this was virtually the same time Williams was on WIP telling a very different story. “It was clear he wanted to change his shot. He came back over the summer with that [change] and that was just something he was into doing, and we wanted to help promote that. He spent a lot of time doing that.”

Those comments, which came out while Williams was in the middle of his call to WIP, were then read to Fultz’s trainer live on the air.

“Oh my god. That’s false. That’s not true,” Williams said, when he was read the “zero doubt” quote from Brown. Williams then answered in the affirmative when asked whether Fultz’s changed mechanics were done specifically to combat the pain he was feeling.

The inability of these two sides to get on the same page on this very basic issue is borderline amazing. More on that below.

Note: If Fultz did, in fact, change his shooting mechanics there are further questions to ask. Such as: Why did he do so without the approval of, and cooperation with, the team? At what point in the offseason did he start making these changes? Did he leave himself enough time to commit these changes to muscle memory before the start of the season? We’ll hold off on diving into these questions at this time, but they’re very legitimate questions to be asked if the team’s claim that Fultz went about making changes to his shot turns out to be true.

Could Fultz’s change in form have caused the injury?

Earlier Wednesday, Colangelo went one step further.

Not only did Colangelo speculate on whether Fultz decided to tinker with his shooting motion on his own, and not just casting doubt over whether the alterations came before the injury, but Colangelo then openly speculated whether those very alterations “caused” the pain Fultz was experiencing.

“Sometime during the month of August, I think, he might have worked on his shot a little bit. It could even be the cause of the irritation and inflammation in the shoulder,” Colangelo said. “New shooting mechanics sometimes puts your shoulder in a different position.”

Again, on the one hand you have a team official openly speculating that Fultz changed his shooting motion, and that change may have actually caused the pain. On the other hand, you have the personal trainer saying that pain forced Fultz to change his shooting motion in order to compensate.

The gulf between these two explanations is startlingly wide, to the point where you wonder, and perhaps worry, about what conversations are and are not happening behind closed doors.

Even Colangelo’s own head coach didn’t necessarily buy that explanation.

“No I haven’t,” Brown said when asked whether he’s ever seen an altered shooting motion cause such an injury. “Was there a connection with the injury? I don’t know. I had never heard of that, but who knows.”

It was one of those instances where you almost hope Colangelo had some basis to make the claim, because just throwing out that hypothetical could be reckless without ground to stand on. What is to be gained by shifting the blame to your 19-year-old rookie for the very injury that is now preventing him from playing the game that he loves? Even if it’s true — and, like Brown, I have my doubts — isn’t it better for all parties to swallow that bit of information and not place more pressure on Fultz?

It was only speculation. But it was very bizarre, to say the least.

Remaining questions

Did Fultz tell the Sixers about the soreness right away?

Something that came up as each side independently discussed whether or not Fultz made a concerted effort to change his shot over the offseason is that the Sixers appear to have been in the dark over when Fultz began feeling soreness in his shoulder.

As mentioned above, Colangelo stated that “sometime during the month of August, I think, he might have worked on his shot a little bit.” Colangelo then went on to say they were alerted to the shoulder soreness “probably late September to early October, when he first received treatment and when it was first reported.”

Brown’s reactions during training camp to Fultz’s altered shooting motion — which were consistently that of a perplexed and perhaps marginally annoyed coach focused on getting his star prospect back to form — certainly suggest a coach who, at that time at least, wasn’t aware of an injury forcing Fultz’s hand. Brown confirmed that yesterday when he continued to state that he still wasn’t aware the initial changes were done to compensate for the pain Fultz was experiencing.

If that timeline Colangelo gave is true, or if Brown’s reactions and words are an indication that the team noticed the altered mechanics far before it was given the shoulder as a possible explanation, then at the very least it appears Fultz didn’t disclose the soreness as quickly as he perhaps should have.

Why would a player alter his mechanics weeks before the season to compensate for an injury, rather than alert the team, rest and focus on returning to the form which has worked for him all his life?

A plausible explanation, or at least the most plausible explanation available, could be that Fultz worried that admitting he was in discomfort would have caused him to miss playing time. For a rookie anxious to make his NBA debut, that could lead to a lapse in judgment. But regardless of whether there’s a believable explanation, leaving the team in the dark while modifications are being made to the most fundamental aspect of your game seems like a less than ideal way of going about it.

Why would Fultz try to change his shooting motion?

One other question that’s frequently raised, including by Fultz’s trainer, is why would a prospect who had so much success shooting suddenly change his shooting motion?

There are a couple of reasonable explanations, from the longer three-point distance in the NBA, to getting the shot off quicker, to a higher release point to help him get the shot up over the better athletes he’d face in the NBA. The Sixers even worked with Hollis Thompson, who shot 44 percent from three-point range at Georgetown, to alter his mechanics and speed up his release, and shooting was Thompson’s one legitimate NBA skill.

There’s also the fact that Fultz shot just 64.9 percent from the free-throw line in college.

“He wasn’t a great free-throw shooter, and perhaps he thought, with the help of a coach, a mentor, whoever brought him to that conclusion that he wanted to change things,” Colangelo speculated.

Yet those kind of changes are typically micro-adjustments, not wholesale changes like what appears to have happened with Fultz.

Should we expect the injury to heal quickly?

The next question: If the Sixers gave Fultz a cortisone injection three weeks ago and he’s still in so much discomfort that he’s unwilling to take a jumper in game action, why should we expect it to magically get better by Tuesday?

That’s a fair question, and one that I don’t think anybody necessarily has the answer, although Colangelo did say it’s “appropriate to take a step back, let him take a breath and get him healthy and ready to resume play, hopefully next week.” Still, it’s important to say the Sixers, as of now, have only committed to reevaluating Fultz next week. If I had to guess, it’s going to require more time before Fultz is ready to resume play.

How long will it take his shot to return to form?

Beyond quelling the pain and discomfort in his shoulder, how long will it take before Fultz is shooting like the dynamic guard we all saw at Washington?

“This is something I’m doing with him. We’re doing it as we speak,” Brown said about fixing his jumper. “I think that this period is a deep breath where we can recalibrate and reclaim some of the things that he used to do to get his shot back on track and find his mojo.”

“We’re trying to address that with this notion of just take him out, take a step back, let everyone take a breath and get him 100 percent right, both mentally and physically,” Colangelo said.

Still, Brown expressed optimism.

“What I know is we can reclaim who he was and revisit that. You don’t just forget who you were for the large majority of life,” Brown said.

Have any relationships been damaged by this mudslinging?

This entire ordeal has been a strange sequence of events, with statements coming out from all sides. Statements that were, almost to a T, eventually disputed, refuted or contradicted as each side seemed determined to distance themselves from any wrongdoing. That has a tendency to cause stress on a relationship.

Fultz’s shoulder will heal. His jump shot should return to form, even if we’re not necessarily sure how long that will take. Relationships are sometimes harder to repair.

If you want an explanation on why the cortisone shot being revealed came from an on-the-record statement from Fultz’s agent, the easiest explanation is that the Fultz camp wanted to control a narrative that had increasingly spiraled out of control, with many around the league questioning whether Fultz’s confidence was at the center of his shooting difficulties. If the Sixers weren’t willing to be forceful enough that his shoulder left him unable to shoot, Fultz’s camp would.

But why on the record rather than “anonymous league source?” It lets potential future clients know that Raymond Brothers took control and shaped the narrative, and it can be used as a recruiting pitch down the line.

Colangelo insists that he and Brothers are on the same page, even if he said “I don’t know what prompted the comment by the agent to the reporter last night.” Only time will tell if that’s really the case.

As for how Fultz, Williams and his inner circle feel about how the Sixers handled this situation? It seems that, despite Williams’ forceful reaction to Brown’s comments on the radio about Fultz changing his shot, they are fine with how things have gone down so far.

“They have [been supportive],” Williams told WIP about the Sixers. “My speaking with anybody on the Sixers has been good. So I don’t have any issues. Markelle doesn’t have any issues with the team whatsoever.

“The Philly coaches have been working with him. Even Brett Brown has taken time out of his schedule in practice to work with Markelle and see if they could get it back,” Williams said. “I think they’ve tried to exhaust their options on how to best help him, and I think they’ve done a pretty good job on that front.”

Is it possible Fultz tweaked his shot AND the injury eventually made it worse?

We tend to paint every situation as an either-or, looking for one cause to pin our explanation on.

But is it possible that Fultz tried to make minor adjustments after summer league to extend his range, to get the ball out quicker or maybe to make his release point slightly more consistent? Maybe he even did this outside of his time spent with Williams?

Then, when the shoulder soreness popped up, did he alter the shot even further to compensate, leaving us with a temporary shooting form which looks nothing like either the form he had at Washington or the form he was working on late in the summer?

Could it be that Brown’s statements that Fultz wanted to make modifications to his shot, and Williams’ assertion that the shot we saw was a result of compensating for discomfort, both have some validity? It’s impossible to say for sure with so many sides seemingly contradicting each other at every turn.

But the one constant in all of this is Brown talking about Fultz intentionally changing his shooting motion, something which he mentioned right from the jump during training camp and maintains to this day. There being absolutely no basis for those now long-held beliefs would be odd. The Sixers continuing to openly question non-existent, mechanical changes if the real, and only, culprit is a sore shoulder could threaten to piss off a lot of parties — from the player, to the agent, to the longtime trainer and mentor.

It would also be odd for a shooter of Fultz’s caliber, and a trainer with the pedigree of Williams, to deliberately change his motion to this borderline horrifying end result.

The combination of slight alterations — alterations which the team doesn’t necessarily agree with — followed by discomfort in Fultz’s shoulder that he didn’t immediately disclose to the team, is the only sequence of events which I can surmise to connect all the dots in an even remotely coherent manner.

Top photo: Vaughn Ridley/Getty Images