Can Jordan Poole Get Back On The Right Track?
Poole's tailspin has been abrupt and unexpected. History says he can still pull through, but time may be running out.
Just a shade over 18 months ago, Jordan Poole was on top of the basketball world. After becoming only the 15th player in league history to start his postseason career with three straight 25+ point games, he continued that ascent throughout the 2022 playoffs — ending up as the No. 3 scorer on a championship squad that re-ignited the Golden State Warriors’ dormant dynasty. The media had even taken to anointing Poole the “third Splash Brother” alongside Steph Curry and Klay Thompson. Days before his 23rd birthday, Poole had reached the NBA’s summit, proving all of his doubters wrong and making his early career setbacks a distant memory.
It’s what makes Poole’s subsequent decline so shocking. There was the “The Punch” from teammate Draymond Green in training camp of 2022; the drastically worse season that followed in Golden State; a seemingly pennies-on-the-dollar trade to the Washington Wizards in July; and, most recently, an extremely rocky start to his career in D.C. It’s hard to believe just how far Poole’s stock has fallen in such a short period of time. The main question now is whether he can reclaim the immense potential he flashed during those 2022 playoffs and turn his career back around.
The numbers with Washington so far this season are undeniably ugly. Although Poole is scoring some — a respectable enough 17.5 PPG — he’s doing it on one of the worst shooting efficiency marks in the league, to go with below-average rates for turnovers, rebounding and defense. Poole has the NBA’s second-worst on-court plus/minus (-15.3 points per 100 possessions, ahead of only San Antonio’s Cedi Osman) and its fifth-worst on-off plus/minus, as the Wizards’ already subpar net rating has dropped by a staggering 14.4 points per 100 with Poole on the court. As a result of all this, Poole carries the NBA’s eighth-worst Estimated RAPTOR rating (-5.2) and has compiled the fourth-fewest Wins Above Replacement (-1.2) in the league.
If such an award existed, Poole would be making a strong early case in the Least Valuable Player race. Instead, he and the 5-23 Wizards — a squad that Poole had called “my own team” in November — are simply languishing near the bottom of the East standings, somehow only a few games ahead of the unspeakably bad Detroit Pistons.
For a guy who called Green an “expensive backpack” for Curry, Poole is not exactly finding life easy outside the Warriors system, in which he benefited from Green’s passing and the spacing that Curry and Thompson help create for teammates. Compared with his 2021-22 breakout season, Poole’s usage rate is unsurprisingly up (from 26.0 to 27.8) but his true shooting percentage is down 7.4 points (59.8% to 52.4%), his 3-point accuracy has fallen by 5.1 points (36.4% to 31.3%), his assist rate is down (21.0% to 17.4%) and his turnover rate is up (13.7% to 14.3%). Overall, his individual points per possession has cratered from 1.12 to 0.97. Those are all hallmarks of a player being asked to take on a role outside of his capabilities.
What’s interesting, though, is that despite losing the benefits of playing with the Warriors’ stars — and Poole’s own reputation for horrible shot selection when left to his own devices — the basic statistical quality of his shots has actually risen since 2021-22. According to the model at PBPStats.com (which, it should be noted, does not include an adjustment for defender proximity), Poole’s average shot that season carried an expected effective field goal percentage of 52%, while his average shot this season checks in at 53%. The difference is just in Poole’s shot-making: In ‘21-22, Poole’s actual eFG% exceeded his expected number by 2.8 percentage points; in ‘23-24, his actual eFG% is 5.4 points worse than expected.
Still, Poole could stand to improve the shots he’s taking. He’s attempting roughly twice his share of field goals from the dreaded 10 to 16-foot range this season (13.0%) as he did in 2021-22 (6.6%). Or at the very least, he needs to make more of those shots when he does take them — the only range of distance from which Poole is converting at a league-average rate is 0 to 3 feet; at every other range, his field goal percentage is at least 5 points worse than league average, if not far worse.
Poole’s vaguely anticipated (among NBA junkies) return to Golden State last Friday was a pretty telling microcosm of his entire Wizards tenure so far. While Poole scored a team-high 25 on his former teammates, he did it on 7-for-21 shooting — including 3-for-12 from downtown — with Washington getting outscored by nine while he was on the court in a losing effort. Overall, Poole also undershot his expected eFG% by 12.5 percentage points, per PBPstats.
It was clear that Poole wanted to prove something to the Warriors for letting him go. But all he really proved was that the version of Poole we’ve seen in Washington so far is basically what we’re going to get, at least for the rest of this season.
Of course, picking his spots better might help Poole get back on track and achieve the potential he laid out for himself a couple of years ago. But if he doesn’t turn things around, he will have one of the most sudden, unexpected downfalls in modern NBA history, at least when compared with his peers through age 22.
Since the ABA-NBA merger in 1976, there were 21 retired players who (like Poole) were in the NBA by age 21 and produced between 4.0 and 6.0 career WAR through age 22 — including at least 2.0 WAR in their age-22 season specifically. Those players averaged 6.4 WAR at ages 23 and 24 combined, part of a normal career arc that saw them peak at age 25 and continue to be productive NBA players into their 30s. We might have reasonably expected Poole to follow the same path, or even to achieve more — after all, he had 41% more WAR at age 22 than his group of historical comparables did.
Instead, Poole is on track to produce -0.3 WAR at ages 23 and 24 combined — and that’s if we give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that, instead of maintaining his dreadful early season pace of -3.7 WAR per 82 team games, he plays the rest of the season at his previous career rate of WAR/82. In other words, over the past two seasons, Poole is missing the mark of where his career “should” be heading by nearly seven wins, and it could get worse by season’s end.
Some players on Poole’s list of age-based comps were able to steer out of the rough years and still have good careers. Zach Randolph was mired on the dysfunctional Trail Blazers while in his early-to-mid 20s, but he would later help form the identity of a Memphis Grizzlies team that was a playoff mainstay. Most, however, didn’t contribute much over the rest of their careers if they flopped in what should start to be a player’s prime run of seasons.
Poole is at real risk to fall into that category, too. In his current form, he is miscast as a co-No. 1 option (sharing duties with Kyle Kuzma), and the post-Bradley Beal Wizards seem to be settling in for a lengthy cycle of rebuilding. He can’t easily move to a more favorable situation, either — he’s under contract with Washington for three more years after 2023-24, at a whopping average annual value of $32 million.
But Poole does have the power to make more of the opportunity at hand, and not settle for the Wizards playing like the league’s worst team while he’s on the court. We know from his Golden State days that Poole has the talent to play better — he just needs to prove it all over again.
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