Warriors castoff Jordan Poole is the ideal player for a tanking team
Jordan Poole has given me a reason to trust the Washington Wizards again.
As a lifelong fan of this painfully mediocre organization, there’s been very little reason to cheer throughout this entire century. In between pockets of mind-blowingly awful lineups were flashes of excitement, which were quickly dashed by career-altering injuries, LeBron James or a blatant disregard for the toughest gun laws in the country, in some order.
The last couple of years have been a particularly tough watch on the court, but at least the team was boring enough — save for Kyle Kuzma’s most outlandish outfits — for everyone to ignore. That’s changed in the past couple of weeks. Suddenly, every NBA fan realized just how nasty of an albatross Bradley Beal’s five-year, $251 million contract with a no-trade clause was. It also became clear just how little the team has gotten for the price tag and just how incompetent of an organization the Wizards had to be to give out the deal in the first place.
It was an embarrassing team to root for! The shame even continued after they replaced President and general manager Tommy Sheppard — whose tenure was supposed to be a reprieve from the never-ending Ernie Grunfeld administration — with Michael Winger, whom owner Ted Leonsis gave his blessing for a roster teardown.
But then the moves started happening, Beal shipped off to Phoenix and Kristaps Porzingis to Boston. The immediate returns might not have been spectacular for either, but the big value was in getting Beal’s money off the books and Porzingis out of the way for a proper teardown.
The third trade, though, is the one that showed how serious this new front office was: dealing Chris Paul to the Warriors for Jordan Poole.
Even at 38, Paul’s basketball genius and veteran savvy would have been enough to give the Wizards some wins they definitely didn’t deserve — just look at the surprisingly frisky 2019-20 Thunder. The Wizards must have seen that possibility and decided not only that they wanted no part in those victories but also that they wanted the antithesis of that kind of veteran presence on the team. Poole checks both anti-boxes perfectly.
Over the past six months or so, Poole went from future star to liability as the Warriors decided they were out of patience while Steph Curry’s title window is still open. Financially, his upcoming salary would have forced the team into the more draconian penalties of the Warriors-targeted collective bargaining agreement. On the court, his reckless gunning and impression of a drunk baby giraffe while dribbling played a significant role in the Warriors’ postseason elimination.
With the Wizards, Poole can start completely fresh in a brand-new win-win partnership aimed at losing. Any notion of a championship window in Washington has been shut, locked and completely boarded up, so there’s nothing to interrupt. Poole can put the ugly mess of last season behind him while still earning a lot of money, retooling his game, serving as one of the team veterans with championship experience and even partying at John Wall’s go-to Rosebar if he feels like it.
In return, the Wizards get a setup not designed to succeed. If the goal is to rebuild from the ground up, the team needs to hit rock bottom first, and Poole is the perfect captain to navigate them there. He is an overly ambitious shooter who takes way too many dribbles and sometimes needs just one made bucket as an excuse to take a deep heat-check 3 that would raise any coach’s blood pressure to dangerous levels. As Golden State experienced, it works wonders when the shots go in and becomes a complete disaster when they don’t.
Winning organizations don’t want that kind of inconsistency anywhere near their roster, but a winning organization is not what the Wizards want to be right now. As they figure out their way forward, Poole can figure out how to make his game work with all the leniency of sub-.500 expectations. History has already shown that an erratic scorer can put up numbers on bad Washington teams and then make his way to a championship roster with Nick Young. Poole could very well be the second coming of that archetype, which is good for the Wizards now and for Poole later.
There’s always a chance that Poole ends up figuring out how to be a star. He is a champion who contributed heavily to the Dubs’ title run two seasons ago. Perhaps he ends up giving the Wizards those exact victories the team was trying to avoid by trading Paul, and the team’s future draft spot starts inching closer to the middle. At that point, the Wizards could offload him to a team trying to get a missing piece for a playoff run, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. A projected starting lineup of Poole, Tyus Jones, Corey Kispert, Deni Avdija and Daniel Gafford is not winning many games.
Most of this will suck for the average Wizards fans, of which there are dozens. Tanking is not fun to watch. Even the most ardent “Trust the Process” supporters are significantly happier — relative to the average fatalistic Philadelphia sports fan — watching Joel Embiid win the MVP award than hoping KJ McDaniels has slightly improved his trade value. D.C. fans are paying the price for the sins of previous front offices that forced this new regime’s hand into this rebuild.
But the rebuild will continue, regardless if morale improves. With that in mind, the least the organization could do is instill trust that things will work out for the team in the end and show that they’re serious about this process. Thanks to their acquisition of Poole, the Wizards have done just that, which is more than they’ve done for the fans in a long time.
Source: SFGATE
