Let me just start off by saying that I LIKE BILL SIMMONS. I’m not one of the haters. Most of the sports media complex simply rags on him because he is more successful than them.

But, his reversal on Markelle Fultz is laughable.

If you followed Simmons prior to the draft or listened to his podcast when it looked like Markelle Fultz would be drafted by the Celtics, you’d know that he fawned all over Fultz like he was the second coming of James Harden (HE MIGHT BE!) and declared in no uncertain terms that he would be the number one pick. But now that the Fultz buzz has waned, with Lonzo Ball and Jayson Tatum commanding the bulk of summer attention, Simmons has shifted course, and by shifted course, I mean he literally starting running the other way screaming his head off (fun starts around 40:00):

“Crunch time: I’m looking at Saric, Simmons, Covington, Redick and T.J. McConnell. Notice who I didn’t mention– Joel Embiid or Markelle Fultz, because I don’t think either of them are going to play crunch time for this team in Year 1, because I’m not sure Embiid is even gonna be on the floor.”

“There’s a lot of Fultz red flags. A lot. It’s concerning… he seems a little immature, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Really high expectations, they traded up for him, which is a bad thing. He messed with his shot already, which is a bad thing. He’s already got hurt in summer league and he was hurt last year. There’s red flags.”

“Here’s the problem if you’re a Philly fan, and you have to be careful becaues they’re fucking maniacs and you can’t say anything about them. They are the most tense fan base in the NBA that we have right now. They are just on-call all the time to get mad. But, the Celtics would do that Tatum trade again in a millisecond. They’d do it in a millisecond. And they’d be like this is great, we have Jayson Tatum and this awesome other high lottery pick that’s great. If I was a Philly fan, I’d be nervous about Lonzo.”

Come on.

Things that have happened since the draft: Markelle Fultz suffered a minor ankle injury in the summer league and admitted to tweaking his shot.

That’s it. That’s everything. Lonzo Ball has been as advertised, and Tatum, who is more polished at this stage of his career, dominated summer league scrubs who will be bagging groceries next week. Fultz was excellent in two summer league games and then mediocre in another before spraining his ankle.

Now, to fair, and at the risk of sounding takey, there is some negative Fultz buzz of late. Let’s unpack it:

He changed his shot: I’d rate this somewhere above being a nothingburger. There was, by most accounts, nothing wrong with Fultz’s shot. He was an over 40% three-point shooter in college and looked just fine in the summer league. Could it have used some mild tweaking at the hands of experienced NBA professionals while under the watchful eye of his coaches and trainers? Yes. Did he need to spend the summer revamping it on his own, putting the team in the unenviable position of trying to dial back the changes to their number one overall pick’s form? No. While Brett Brown was diplomatic about it and told our Kevin Kinkead that everyone was reading too much into it, it’s not a great first impression to go off on your own and screw with your ($$$) shot.

Chick-fil-A: This was actually a topic on Simmons’ podcast. It was on ours, too. The Chick-fil-A thing is delicious fun and led to a marketing deal for the Sixers, but I can do without Fultz loading up on it. I’m sure that the Sixers, who have a 5-star chef in their complex and closely monitor each player, don’t allow Fultz to grab a 12-count for lunch every day (except for that one time they literally gave him a table full of nuggets). But a part of me thinks that Fultz stops by one every. single. day. on the way to and fro practice.

Maturity: I can add some insight here– Fultz is a good kid and will do what he’s told, but he does have to be told what to do. He’s 19. Compared to Ben Simmons, who is two years older, Fultz, who was cut from his high school team his sophomore year, has been in the spotlight for a much shorter period of time. Simmons has essentially been a superstar for 10 years, and you get the sense that his training regimen is a tad more structured at this point. That last part is just my view, but Fultz is young. He may be a year or two behind his peers, who’ve dealt with the spotlight for much longer.

But that’s it. Nothing else has changed with Fultz. He’s the same guy the Sixers drafted. You know, the one Bill Simmons loved so much at the time.