Let’s empty the notebook. Here’s everything Markelle Fultz did, in order, during his first five-and-a-half minutes on an NBA floor: 

—entered the game with 2:54 left in the first quarter with a bench mob, like it was some kind of secret

—the crowd gave him a standing ovation

—immediately turned the ball over, running straight into a defender and coughing it up

—tried to go over a screen, committed a foul

—easy lay-up off a Joel Embiid screen

—cheeky behind-the-back pass to Embiid off another screen

—haplessly spun into Devin Harris on a fastbreak, fortunately found Ersan Ilyasova for a midrange jumper

—pull-up airball

—Jamal Murray drained a three in his face

—pedestrian assists on a couple Robert Covington threes

—stuffed by Mason Plumlee

—offensive rebound, follow-up floater blocked by Murray

—subbed out at 9:22 in the second quarter 

Fultz looked bad; he looked nervous. His second half performance was a little bit better. Assuming this isn’t a one-off cameo, he’ll get nine more appearances before the playoffs start. Who knows what Brett Brown—who teared up at the pregame presser when he announced Fultz would play Monday night—will do with his rookie point guard then. If Fultz could give the Sixers eight decent minutes per night in the postseason, they would be happy with that and he would have something to build on over the summer. He doesn’t look like he can provide that, but we’ll see. 

This all feels beside the point, which is one way of describing the entire Markelle Fultz Saga at this late stage of the season: a true internet age phenomenon in terms of actual developments vs. the amount of ink spilled over them. It’s a glut of speculation, gossip, fretting, and dubiously sound detective work around one extraordinary fact. The first overall pick in last year’s draft got hurt and forgot how to shoot, or vice versa. This is a gobsmacking thing, but that is about all it is. The how and why of it is idiot Rashomon as told by agents and executives with competing agendas. Journalists are searching for truth they can scarcely find and bloggers are crafting baroque theories from vertically photographed iPhone videos of shootarounds. This has clearly gotten out of hand and Fultz knows it. That knowledge isn’t helping him. 

This culminates in an emotionally (and still physically?) wounded 19-year-old getting the sweet yet mortifying Worst Kid On The Little League Team treatment from an arena full of Sixers fans who nine months ago thought he was going to turn their franchise into OKC Mk. II. There are obviously good and bad ways for this to break from here, but Fultz dropping fifteen in his next game would make everybody rooting for him—which is everybody with a heart, really—about as nervous as if he went two-for-six with a foul and two turnovers. There’s no way around this: he’s going to be a headcase until he definitively proves he’s not, and he probably won’t be able to begin to do that until next year. What’s happening right now is a perhaps minimally helpful exercise, Brown gently introducing Fultz to NBA competition. The first time, at least, is out of the way.

In the summer of 2013, I flew out to Washington D.C. to do a story on ESPN’s soccer broadcast crew. Ian Darke, Taylor Twellman, Bob Ley, Alexi Lalas, et al. A press agent had pitched me the idea; I took him up on it without thinking. I hastily found an outlet that would pay me for it, booked a hotel room, and drafted a list of questions I never ended up asking. I didn’t know I would have the level of access ESPN gave to me. It was essentially a day-and-a-half-long hang out with the guys, which I was ill-prepared for. I barely spoke, paralyzed by nervousness. I spent a lot of time writing down useless things so nobody would make eye contact with me. On the second day, I downed six beers in the hotel room before catching the bus to RFK Stadium and that made me, if not a better reporter, a chattier one. I did a bad job. I hated the article I ended up writing. I’m pretty sure Ian Darke, who’s a very nice man, was wondering what the hell I was doing the entire time. 

In a fortunate twist, my editor said the piece was fine. Not groundbreaking work, but readable and sort of interesting. She told me to pitch her more stuff, so I did. A bunch of it got published. After a while, she and her boss made a contributing editor. And that is the wholly unremarkable story of how I broke into sportswriting. I did a thing I thought I could be good at poorly, then gradually got less terrible at it. 

Allow me to insult Markelle Fultz by comparing him to my younger self. He showed up to the NBA expecting to succeed, hit a physical snag, then a mental snag—or, again, vice versa—and that has derailed his once-and-possibly-still promising professional career. He’s been suffering, to coin a term, his Shamefully Mute in Front of Ian Darke moment, and it’s more damaging than mine because there are millions of spectators involved. But there’s a way out of this, which is doing the thing he’s suddenly no longer sure he can.

Fultz got his words in before deadline on Monday. Though they weren’t pretty, he didn’t dribble the ball off his foot or concuss anybody in the third row with a wayward floater. That’s technically progress. There’s no guarantee it gets better from here, but it almost has to. Actual failure is often a lot less worse than what you would fear might happen. As you discover that over time, the fear recedes and your performance improves. Maybe what Fultz needs to get out of his system, as the season comes to a close, is some bad—but not catastrophic, not ruinous—basketball. Just so he knows it won’t literally kill him. Then he can hit the gym this summer the kind of confidence you get from escaping disaster and get to work on becoming what we all hope he can be.