You’d be forgiven if you missed it — certainly, there was plenty of other stuff going on with the Philadelphia 76ers over the past few weeks — but Sixers guard Markelle Fultz is spending his early summer working out in Los Angeles with Drew Hanlen, a respected skills coach who’ll be tasked with helping rebuild the haunted, disappearing and busted shot of 2017’s No. 1 overall pick.

Hanlen, who played point guard at Belmont University before going into business for himself, made his bones at the NBA level by working with fellow St. Louis products Bradley Beal and David Lee, and has become a rising trainer-to-the-stars in recent years by training a slew of up-and-coming NBA players. The roster of players he’s helped develop includes high-lottery picks like Joel Embiid, Jayson Tatum, Andrew Wiggins, Zach LaVine and Kelly Oubre Jr., among others; he added three more draftees this year (No. 6 overall pick Mo Bamba, second-round selections Justin Jackson and DeAnthony Melton) and has already been working with potential 2019 top pick R.J. Barrett, one of the most highly prized prospects set to join the college ranks this year when he suits up for Mike Krzyzewski at Duke.

This summer, Hanlen’s made time in his schedule to work with Fultz, who entered the league tipped as a talented pick-and-roll playmaker capable of spacing the floor, shooting 41.3 percent from the college 3-point line in his lone year at Washington … only to completely fall apart from beyond arm’s reach of the basket seemingly as soon as he put on a Sixers jersey.

Markelle Fultz’s shot/shoulder saga was one of the stories of the NBA season

The saga of Fultz’s shot became one of the more bizarre stories of the NBA season, with conflicting reports from his team and his agent about the nature of the issue, and how things deterioriated to the point that a player who used to be able to pull up from 25 feet without a second thought all of a sudden had a horrifying shooting motion and wouldn’t even think of attempting a shot outside the lane.

Throughout the worrisome process, the principals involved maintained that the issue was physical — that Fultz had suffered a shoulder injury in the course of his workouts between the draft and Las Vegas Summer League, that the soreness led him to alter his shooting motion, that he needed to be benched to rest the shoulder, and that he needed to be shut down indefinitely to heal the “scapular muscle imbalance” that was ruining his form. But then, all of a sudden, the soreness was “completely gone” … and still Fultz didn’t come back. He wouldn’t return to the court until March 26, with only a 10 games left in the season. While Fultz did show flashes of dynamism in his season-ending cameo, he still didn’t show much in the way of range or willingness to fire from deep.

Was the issue in Markelle Fultz’s shoulder, or in his head?

That ongoing reluctance might lead you to wonder — as many did throughout this whole ordeal — whether the problem had less to do with Fultz’s body and more to do with his mind. Well, Hanlen dispensed with that question during a recent interview on the “Talking Schmidt Podcast,” offering a frank assessment of where things stood with Fultz when host Daniel Schmidt asked how he got hooked up with last year’s top selection:

With Markelle, obviously he had one of the most, you know, documented cases of kind of the yips in basketball in recent years, where he completely forgot how to shoot, and had multiple hitches in his shot. So for me, it was, hey, listen, how can I get this kid who was No. 1 in last year’s draft back rolling and get him to the point where he was before, if not better?

Since Fultz began showcasing his busted free-throw stroke a little under a year ago, plenty of people have speculated that the “yips,” and not any imbalance or soreness or other sort of pain in Fultz’s right shoulder, was the driving force behind the implosion of his shot. As far as I know, though, nobody who’s closely worked with Fultz has just come out and publicly pinpointed the problem as a mental block … until now.

Hanlen’s diagnosis dovetails with a report earlier this week from Philly.com’s Keith Pompey, who noted that Sixers coach and interim head of basketball operations Brett Brown had visited Fultz in L.A. during his work with Hanlen to correct the shooting woes … which, as Pompey wrote, “were actually mental, according to several sources.”

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