“(It was) a mixture of coming to a new team and your just trying to fit in and do the best you can — there’s obvuiosuly that as with anybody — but then when you add on this whole hand thing, all of a sudden I can’t control the ball when I am going up to shoot. When I catch it, my hand — specifically my pinkie and ring finger are clawed together so I would never really have full control over the ball,” Fields explained. “The muscles were just not firing the way they should. I’m thinking: is this all mental right now; is it all me or is there something else going on?
“Mentally I am just all over the place because I have no idea why this is happening so finally I had to go to the trainers and start this process of figuring out what was going on.”
The Raptors forward said he had surgery in New York on Wednesday and explained that there was almost a sense of relief in discovering the injury as it helped answer internal doubts as to why he was off to a poor start.
“The whole time I am just internalizing everything, I am just so bad right now that I am hoping, almost praying, that there’s something wrong with me because I know I can’t be this bad and I know I am not that mentally far gone from all of this,” Fields said.
“To be honest, to find out that there is something going on with my hand was kind of a blessing in disguise, because I needed that going forth, that piece of mind that it wasn’t just necessarily all in my head. I really did have something going on.”
Fields, who has yet to make a three-point field goal this season, said it won’t take long for him to find his old shooting form once the hand heals.
“My mechanics weren’t that bad, even with this situation, it was just trying to adjust slight things to compensate for it,” Fields said. “It’s definitely not the point where I have to go back and re-teach myself how to shoot a basketball.”
