The Philadelphia 76ers are a perennial playoff team now but it wasn’t too long ago that they were the doormat of the NBA. They tanked in a manner that was never seen before as they just wasted away seasons in order to get high draft picks.
Unfortunately, they didn’t do a great job of drafting, as not a lot of their high picks ended up having success. The first name that immediately comes to mind is Markelle Fultz, who they selected with the first pick of the 2017 NBA Draft. A shoulder injury early on in his career led to Fultz changing his shooting form and things just went completely downhill from then out. He never developed into the star that they’d hoped he would be and in 2019, they traded him to the Orlando Magic.
Fultz has shown flashes of brilliance with the Magic and when he went up against his former team on Monday, he put on a show. He finished with 12 points, 10 assists, 4 steals, and 0 turnovers, as the Magic won 119-109. After the game, Joel Embiid showed a lot of love to his former teammate who was playing in Philadelphia for the first time after the trade.
via Sixers Wire:
“That’s actually crazy that that was his first game back here, but I’ve always been a big fan of him,” said Joel Embiid of Fultz. “I talk to him and when we did trade him, I was disappointed because I felt like we had given up on him too early. Even back then, even without a jump shot. I still thought he was an amazing talent just because it’s so quick.”
The talent is clearly there and we usually see teams hold on to players like Fultz for quite a while, especially considering how he was the first pick of the draft. The Sixers were done with him though and trading him to the Magic did work out eventually for them. The package they got in return from Fultz included a 2020 first-round pick, which they used to draft Tyrese Maxey.
Joel Embiid Denied That He Was Going At Ben Simmons
While Embiid has lots of love and respect for Fultz, the same cannot be said about the man they had selected with the first pick of the 2016 NBA Draft, Ben Simmons. Many within the Sixers probably felt sorry for how things ended with Fultz but that can’t be said about Simmons, whose exit was messy, to say the least.
Embiid and Simmons recently faced off for the first time since the Australian got traded and you could sense the tension. Embiid seemed to go after him a few times but he denied that was the case after the game, as he stated he plays with the same aggression in every game. Things haven’t gone well for Simmons after the trade and there are already calls for the Nets to ship him out of town before the trade deadline. It is sad to see how the careers of Simmons and Fultz have panned out but they still have time to turn things around.
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