Markelle Fultz was the Best Guard Prospect of the Decade

On my phone I keep a list of my favorite NBA Draft prospects since the 2017 season. I decided to do it one day to keep track of how my opinions on certain guys stack up across the years. I’ll write about it at some point, but for my purposes now, I only want to show you my top five:

5: Lonzo Ball - Yeah, I fell for it

4: Evan Mobley - Oh you mean the next Anthony Davis?

3: Cade Cunningham - Maybe you can tell by now that I'm a sucker for long playmakers

2: Zion Williamson - The most efficient season in CBB history will lure anyone in

1: Markelle Fultz - Yes, that one.

I thought, out of any player of the last five years, Markelle Fultz was the best draft prospect. And even though they’d be scared to say it nowadays, a lot of other people thought so too.

The opinion around Markelle Fultz has changed a lot since 2017, and rightfully so. Because of medical obstacles, Fultz never lived up to his billing as the #1 pick; he is largely seen now as a bust. The Sixers saw this way sooner than Fultz-truthers like I did, trading him to the Magic for scraps only a few years into his career.

But even though Fultz' career hasn't gone how we thought it may, I don’t want us to lose sight of what Markelle Fultz could have been. I want to celebrate Markelle Fultz the prospect, the guy that I and the rest of the basketball world thought fell in love with before the 2017 NBA Draft.

The hype started before Fultz even stepped foot on University of Washington’s campus. When he committed in 2015, Fultz thought he was walking into a NCAA championship roster. It seemed like future All-Star Dejounte Murray thought so too. Here’s a tweet from the summer of 2015 where the Huskies point guard welcomed Fultz’ commitment with open arms:

Murray wasn’t the only talented player on the roster at that time either. The team fielded high-flying Marquese Chriss at forward, not to mention defensive phenom Matisse Thybulle on the wing. Once he was done with his senior year of basketball in Maryland, it seemed like Fultz was primed to cut down nets in the NCAA tournament with a stacked University of Washington roster.

But well, that’s not what happened. You see, the class before him actually performed a bit too well during their first year in Seattle. Chriss and Murray were both projected as first round picks after their freshman seasons, and both decided to bolt for the draft. Marquese Chriss rocketed up draft boards to pick #8, and Murray snuck into the first round at pick #29. Of course Fultz was happy for those two guys to get drafted, but what he committed to – a young, talented roster – was immediately gutted after just one year.

Those two departures remained a huge “what if” for Fultz, even after his lone season at UW. “I think we would be No. 1 in the country” Fultz said in a Seattle Times article from 2017, “We would have gone to the (NCAA) tournament and won the tournament. I know it.”

Instead of competing for a NCAA Championship, the Huskies went 9-22 during Fultz’ lone season. That record became one of the only knocks on Fultz as a prospect, and allegedly why the Celtics traded out of the #1 pick.

His college record aside, Fultz’ profile as a player was close to flawless. His numbers were unprecedented for a freshman, scoring 23 points a game along with nearly 6 rebounds and 6 assists, too. That production, combined with his insane physical traits, made Fultz a can’t-miss guy. Let’s break down his draft profile piece by piece.

Physical Traits

Fultz’ frame was ideal for an NBA point guard. He was 6’5 with a 6’10 wingspan. This meant two things: He was taller than most NBA point guards, and could use those long arms to seem even bigger than that. On defense, for example, we saw Fultz to swat taller players’ shots to hell whenever he wanted to (I do apologize for the video quality on these... turns out 2017 was 100 years ago in computer years):

The chase down seemed to be his favorite, but he used that 6’10 wingspan to impound plenty of shots in the halfcourt too. Even jumpshots:

But his physical traits weren’t just limited to his height and wingspan. Fultz was also a freak athlete in his own right, evidenced in clips like this where he rises up for a hammer after sprinting past a double team:

Without a doubt, Fultz was a physical specimen in any sense of the word. Very rarely (read, never) do you see a 6’5 point guard with a 6’10 wingspan and out-of-the-gym bounce. And we haven’t even talked about basketball yet.

Scoring

It may be hard to imagine now, but Markelle Fultz was one of the best scorers in college basketball his freshman season. Not only did he cash 23 points a night, but he did it on excellent efficiency: 47% from the field along with 41% from downtown. This is on top of countless double teams (remember, his supporting cast was pretty poor) and endless comeback attempts.

These numbers would look good at Duke, but they look even better when you take into account how inefficient he could have been on that Washington team. He never really got an open shot, and the offense was forced to chug through him at all times. He finished the season with an astronomical 31.4% usage rate – much higher than the likes of other freshman phenoms like #3 pick Jayson Tatum and #4 Josh Jackson, and nearly double that of #2 pick Lonzo Ball. If there was anyone to bet on carrying a large load in the NBA, it was Fultz.

But it wasn’t just the raw production – Fultz scored in so many ways it seems absurd to look back at. He could shoot over you:

Slither around you:

Power through you:

Or simply demoralize you with yet another finish that you didn’t think was physically possible:

He even had one of those Penny Hardaway spin-stepbacks that NBA Twitter has been loving lately:

He passes the eye test easily. But as his shooting numbers suggest, he was a remarkably efficient player too. He could give you twelve baskets in twelve different ways. That is, what we call in the business, a defender’s worst nightmare.

His three-point shot was so smooth back then, too. He could catch and shoot really well in college, but he rarely got the chance because of his situation at Washington. Three-point looks weren’t going to come easily, so Fultz created them himself with the ball in his hands. Do you realize how hard it is to shoot above 40% from three, even as just a spot up shooter? Well, Fultz was doing it off of the dribble night in and night out.

Passing

His ability to see the floor was one of my favorite parts of Fultz’ game. For a freshman to log a 35.5% assist percentage is asinine; for reference, that figure stands as one of the best assist percentages ever recorded in college basketball. It’s higher than any of Chris Paul’s college seasons at Wake Forest, James Harden’s at Arizona, or Russell Westbrook’s at UCLA.

Assist percentage actually doesn’t even do Fultz’ talent justice. In order to record a higher assist percentage, your teammates have to actually make their shots, something the 9-win Huskies were not great at doing. Once again, if Fultz had gone to a school with better teammates, I think there’s a serious chance he may have been a more touted prospect than Zion Williamson.

It wasn’t just that he saw the open man, it’s that he created the open man. Fultz’ gravity was so astronomical that teams tried to suffocate him with double teams almost every possession. That might work against guys like Devin Booker, but Markelle Fultz would use leverage that decision against them with his passing. Look at how he beats the UCLA double team by pulling them as far away from the help’s man as possible before elevating to make the tough pass to the wide-open man. The play resulted as they usually did at UW... poorly.

Look at how much attention he attracts from the Gonzaga defense in this next one. In this play Fultz has three of the five Bulldogs on a string as his teammate simply relocates to the block. After breaking through the first two guys with a spin move, Fultz forces the third defender to help at the last second, leaving a Husky wide open under the rim for the layup. After fumbling the pass, #33 gets sent to the line:

Because he was the only person on the team that could cause havoc, teams often switched to zone defenses against Washington in order to make other guys beat them. This is what usually happened:

His passing was, and maybe still is, his best skill in my mind. That anticipatory passing is still there in glimpses for the Magic, but it’s few and far between at this point. I could keep going, but I think I've made my point.

The Greatest Player that Never Was

Markelle Fultz is not usually mentioned among the biggest “what ifs” in NBA history, but I really think he should be. He was the best guard I’ve ever scouted, and if we’re honest with ourselves, one of the best prospects of the entire 2010s. If you want to put Anthony Davis or Zion Williamson above him, I wouldn't qualm… but I don't know if I'd necessarily agree either.

Fultz had everything you could want in a prospect. He played elite basketball under hard conditions, and to this day I don’t blame the Sixers for trading up to draft him. I don’t know if anyone will supplant him as my favorite prospect of all time because, at this point, his college career has been deified in my mind.

You know how Boomers talk about Magic and Bird? Or Gen X with Jordan, and Millennials with LeBron? Well, I think that might be me in 2040 with Markelle Fultz. If someone has a sneaky pass, it’s Fultz-esque to me. An acrobatic finish around the rim? There he is again. Depending on how deeply the Fultz lore becomes engrained in my mind, I may even sit down my kids to watch a 2016-17 Washington Huskies game, just so that they don’t have any questions about who the greatest player to never play was.