If Sixers Fans Want To Help Markelle Fultz, They Should Give Him the Silent Treatment
by Boobie
To Sixers fans’ disappointment, last year’s bizarre Markelle Fultz jump shot has not turned out to be confined to last season. Despite spending the offseason working with Drew Hanlen, ballyhooed personal trainer to the likes of Joel Embiid and Jayson Tatum, and allegedly shooting 150,000 jumpers, Fultz’s is still less than what it was in high school and college. Last night, in his second game of the season and the fifteenth of his regular season career, he finally made his first NBA three, but more significant was the fact that he passed up a look earlier in the game that was so open, and that he so obviously needs to take to be a passable NBA player, that it would have been less awkward if he had tripped and his pants had fallen down.
With all the reasons Philadelphia’s fans have to frustrated with Fultz, though — his strange case of the yips, the fact that the team traded what will almost certainly be a top-5 pick this year along with the pick that became seeming future superstar Jayson Tatum last year, his wearing that dumb looking compression shirt under his jersey which undercuts any potential cool factor by 80% — they have been incredibly, uncharacteristically supportive of him. The crowd erupted when he made that first three (notably off the bounce, where he has looked far more comfortable than off the catch from all distances), the same way it erupted at the end of last year when he unexpectedly secured his first career triple double:
Here’s the thing: that out-of-character support is actually very bad, according to some in the media. It makes sense to me: teams famously hate playing with home court advantage, which is why the Seattle Seahawks and Texas A&M Aggies are so ashamed of their so-called “Twelfth Man.” However, I don’t think that booing a player, as Philadelphia’s fans are famously wont to do, is the way to go with a player who’s issues are clearly rooted in a lack of confidence. In the article linked above, the Ringer’s Paolo Uggetti suggests that Sixers fans just treat him like a normal player instead of showing him that they’re behind him as he tries to find his first-overall-pick form. I think they should take it a step further: pretend he doesn’t exist.
When my girlfriend gives me the silent treatment, it works every time. No matter who is actually right in whatever argument precipitated the punishment — I’d put it at about 60–40 in her favor — I always end up apologizing, which means that she wins. It’s an absolutely bulletproof strategy. If we extrapolate that to the entire 76ers fanbase ignoring Fultz, then he will have no choice but to modify his behavior, start taking and making jumpshots again, and become a superstar — in this way, the fanbase will win as well.
Fans can’t just go quiet when Fultz has the ball, though — during random mid-season games against uninspiring opponents, this won’t be that different from their reaction any other player on the team catching the ball. No, they need to go the extra step and pretend that they can’t see him at all. This means outside games — not stopping him for pictures or autographs, walking into him on the sidewalks as though they can’t see him, getting his follow count on Instagram and Twitter down to zero — as well as in them.
When Fultz is playing, fans need to yell at Brett Brown and ask why he’s only playing four players. When he has the ball, they need to scream in terror, as though an invisible, potentially malevolent ghost has stolen the ball and is dribbling it around the court. Once this starts working and Fultz begins to improve, they can start showing positive reinforcement… for the ghost. Holding up signs thanking the ghost, wearing Antoine Tyler Washington University jerseys, using #NBAVote to vote the Sixers Ghost into the 2018–19 NBA All-Star Game.
Positive reinforcement is clearly bad, otherwise media members would not be bemoaning a home crowd cheering hard for one of their team’s players, as Reggie Miller did during the broadcast yesterday, hours prior to Uggetti’s article being published. Given Philly fans’ penchant for booing players (mostly wrongly) and the decades of negative press it’s gotten them, negative reinforcement is obviously also out as a motivational technique. If the Sixers are going to salvage Fultz’s career and the trade that brought him to Philadelphia, there’s only one viable course of action: pretending he doesn’t exist until he proves that he’s worthy of our acknowledgement, out of love.
