PORTLAND, Ore. — From 5:44 to 6:10 p.m. Thursday, Jordan Poole looked like one of the most popular, carefree players within the Washington Wizards’ traveling party.
Starting in the left corner and moving around the 3-point arc to the right corner and back again, Poole received passes from assistant coach David Vanterpool and hoisted shots. Poole occasionally drove into the lane for floaters and layups.
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The 24-year-old combo guard looked focused as he worked out, but every so often he broke up the monotony by smiling and talking to teammates and staff members. On one foray to the basket, Poole grabbed the ball after it fell through the hoop and playfully bounced it off the foot of Addison Lee, a Wizards assistant video coordinator. A short while later, Poole chatted with point guard Tyus Jones and Vanterpool. When Danilo Gallinari loped onto the court, Poole greeted him, too.
Those 26 minutes may have seemed like nothing special, but they hinted at a larger truth about one of the NBA’s most visible, and often maligned, players. What fans often have perceived about Poole — that he can be aloof — is not the reality now, in his first year with the Wizards.
“He’s always got a smile on his face,” Washington’s Corey Kispert said after a recent game. “He can talk to anybody. Off the court, he’s just a ray of light. He always brings good energy, and it’s good to see Jordan every single day when I walk into the building. I know I can count on him to pick me up if I’m not feeling great.”
On Friday night in San Francisco, Poole will reach an important, and almost certainly uncomfortable, milestone: his first game against the Golden State Warriors. Poole’s four-year Warriors tenure included winning the 2021-22 NBA championship — and being punched by Draymond Green during a team practice in October 2022. The 2022-23 Warriors never recovered fully from that incident, and Poole, whom Warriors coach Steve Kerr once called a “foundational” member of the roster, was jettisoned after a second-round playoff exit in the trade to Washington.
Before this season started, Poole said he welcomed a fresh start and the opportunity to be a primary face of a franchise, even though Washington had just started a rebuild.
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It has been a tough go.
His defense often has been horrendous, and his offense has been inefficient.
Now either first or second on opposing teams’ scouting reports, Poole often encounters extra attention from defenses — and extra physicality, especially when he doesn’t have the ball in his hands.
“This is the most that they’ve been on me other than the playoffs or the finals,” Poole said. “I think it’s awesome, honestly, just to feel that over the course of the game how teams are over and over and over night-in, night-out coming out with physicality because that’s what’s in their game plan. That’s what coaches think would be a good way to slow me down. So, I’m embracing it, learning from it, growing from it.”
The learning curve has been steep, especially since he’s playing on a team with precious little offensive firepower, especially in the fourth quarter, when opposing defenses ramp up their intensity and the pace of games slows down. He has made 41.2 percent of his field-goal attempts, the second-lowest percentage of his NBA career, and 31.7 percent of his 3s, also the second-lowest percentage of his career. The advanced analytics database Cleaning the Glass, which omits stats compiled in garbage time, pegs Poole’s turnover rate at 14.7 percent, far below-average among NBA combo guards this season.
“He’s still learning how to make others better, how to score, when to score, still learning defensively,” Wizards forward Kyle Kuzma recently said.
Poole has shown signs of life lately, but he’s been unable to string together consecutive strong games. After he scored 30 points on 12-of-18 shooting in a victory over Indiana on Dec. 15, he managed just 14 points on 5-of-17 shooting two nights later in Phoenix. Following a 28-point game Monday in Sacramento in which he made eight of his 13 3-point attempts, he stumbled to a 13-point night in a victory Thursday in Portland.
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But any assessment of Poole’s 2023-24 season so far must address the elephant in the room: a viral video shot on Nov. 12 from the stands during a narrow loss in Brooklyn and posted on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, the next day. It showed a Wizards huddle during a timeout and Poole seemingly ignoring coach Wes Unseld Jr. as Unseld drew up a play on a clipboard. In that video, Poole threw a towel to the court as Unseld diagrammed the play. Most damning of all was a caption that read: “mad he got looked off,” seemingly indicating that Poole was furious that a teammate didn’t pass him the ball.
That tweet went viral and was aggregated ruthlessly. SB Nation, for instance, ran a headline that said: “Jordan Poole blatantly ignored Wizards huddle and looked totally lost after timeout.”
The truth about that video is far different.
With Washington trailing 93-92 late in the fourth quarter, Poole threw a bad pass that Nets guard Spencer Dinwiddie deflected and stole. On Brooklyn’s ensuing possession, Mikal Bridges sank a turnaround jumper over Poole.
The Wizards called a timeout.
Poole was angry because he had just turned the ball over and allowed a basket, not because he had been looked off by a teammate.
The video that had been posted on social media had been edited in such a way to look as though Poole only looked at Unseld’s diagram as Poole was exiting the huddle.
Many Wizards fans haven’t given Poole the benefit of the doubt since.
But in its live broadcast from that Nets-Wizards game, archived on NBA League Pass, Monumental Sports Network aired the Wizards’ timeout huddle live, and while that footage showed Poole throwing the towel to the court in frustration, it also showed Poole watching Unseld discuss the play for 15 consecutive seconds.
In recent days, Wizards center Daniel Gafford said of Poole: “He, for sure, is one of the guys that cares.”
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“He’s always talking, communicating, trying to figure things out on a day-to-day basis and just trying to be better pretty much,” Gafford added. “He’s one of the guys that’s one of our main vocal ones on the floor, especially when it comes to practice and stuff like that, because he’s just trying to find ways to help us get better.”
To be sure, Poole is far from perfect. He is sometimes his worst enemy.
Early in Thursday’s fourth quarter, with the Wizards leading the Trail Blazers 95-83, the Blazers’ Jerami Grant elevated for a 3 from the left corner, and Poole closed out with a high left hand, contributing to a miss. On his closeout, Poole landed out of bounds and watched the ball bounce off the backboard without getting back into the play. Grant collected the offensive rebound — a rebound that Poole at the very least could have tried to corral if he had not been ball-watching. Grant then passed to Anfernee Simons, who sank a 3 of his own, turning the game’s momentum in the Blazers’ favor.
Those are the kinds of players that drive coaches nuts, and on his sideline, Unseld shook his head.
Washington wound up winning the game 118-117.
Poole’s teammates are well aware that Poole is a lightning rod for criticism.
“He’s an interesting dude,” forward Deni Avdija said after a recent game. “Look at him as coming to Golden State and being one of the (corner)stones for winning a championship. When you’re a player that is so important for a championship team, when you’re going to leave the team, the spotlight’s always going to be on you. And he’s a young dude. He’s entertaining. I feel like that’s part of it.
“He loves basketball,” Avdija added. “I mean, you can see it day-in and day-out. You come into the gym, (and) he’s one of the first guys in, always working on his game, always staying positive. He has good vibes, you know what I’m saying? I feel like no matter what’s around him, because he has a lot of attention and sometimes on social media he has too much attention, I would say, he still keeps himself composed and focused, and that’s what I like about him.”
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Poole, of course, was under the spotlight all last season following Green’s punch. For that reason, many of the Wizards’ incumbent players didn’t know what to expect after Poole’s trade from the Warriors.
He has reminded Kispert of Kristaps Porziņģis, who was traded to the Wizards during the 2021-22 season after the Dallas Mavericks gave up on him. Porziņģis turned out to be an asset in the Wizards’ locker room.
“Porzingis was the same way — kind of a pleasant surprise in the same way,” Kispert said. “We all heard a lot of rumors of him coming from Dallas and the things that happened there. And then when he showed up in our locker room, he immediately took me by surprise, and he treated everyone great. Anybody off the team or in my circle of friends back home who were asking me about him — I could only say positive things about him.
“And Jordan’s been the same way: (He’s) been an absolute pleasure to be a teammate of and to get to know.”
(Top photo: Soobum Im / USA Today)
Josh Robbins is a senior writer for The Athletic. He began covering the Washington Wizards in 2021 after spending more than a decade on the Orlando Magic beat for The Athletic and the Orlando Sentinel, where he worked for 18 years. His work has been honored by the Football Writers Association of America, the Green Eyeshade Awards and the Florida Society of News Editors. He served as president of the Professional Basketball Writers Association from 2014 to 2023. Josh is a native of the greater Washington, D.C., area. Follow Josh on Twitter @JoshuaBRobbins
