'I got to learn from the best of the best': Jordan Poole embracing Washington’s challenge (2024)

WASHINGTON — Jordan Poole often employs a metaphor to describe how NBA franchises develop over time.

A team, the 24-year-old guard says, resembles a painting. As practices and games fly by, everyone within the organization — players, staff members, coaches and executives — adds brush strokes, creating something that may, or may not, eventually please the eye.

Poole has now seen the process from two contrasting perspectives. The Golden State Warriors already were the NBA’s “Mona Lisa” in 2019 when they drafted Poole with the 28th pick. The Washington Wizards, the team that traded for Poole several months ago, are now a blank canvas.

With the Warriors, Poole was a role player who sought to maintain what Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, Steve Kerr and Bob Myers had crafted. With the Wizards, Poole has the chance to be a central figure in creating something brand new. Whether the Wizards one day morph into a work of art could depend in large part on him, a reality he said he embraces and thinks about constantly.

“Golden State, their picture is already painted,” Poole said during an interview with The Athletic. “Some other organizations, they’re already established or they have their foundation. But it was cool ’cause I got to learn from the best of the best.

“That’s the challenge,” he added. “The challenge is learning and applying what you took and trying to build everything up from the common denominators of what you do know, what you took from different teams, different age groups, different areas, different coaches, and then you apply what you think is needed or what you’ve asked or what you think will help and see what masterpiece comes out of that.”

Speak to people within the Wizards these days about Poole and they almost always say the same thing: that Poole has bought into the vision of new Monumental Basketball president Michael Winger and new Wizards general manager Will Dawkins. The season ahead will be less about winning games and more about establishing sound habits, about individual and team growth and about changing the perception of the organization. An underachieving franchise that has seemed hopelessly stuck in recent years will attempt to emerge from its malaise.

New energy has come from many sources, including from returning forward Kyle Kuzma and new point guard Tyus Jones, but Poole often seems to be at the center of things. This month, Poole has provided one of the most active, and encouraging voices in team huddles.

“You see it every practice, you see it in games,” coach Wes Unseld Jr. said. “I think anytime that things get competitive, he tries to rally his guys, his group.”

Poole was one of the first Wizards players to reach out to Bilal Coulibaly after the team drafted the 18-year-old. Poole later asked team officials to place Coulibaly’s locker next to his so he can help the teenager transition from France to the United States and to the NBA.

Last Thursday, when Washington’s second-string and third-string players rallied in the fourth quarter against the Charlotte Hornets in a preseason exhibition, Poole and Kuzma led the cheering from the bench.

Veteran big man Taj Gibson describes Poole as someone who transcends any cliques within the team, speaking with everyone each day, often with a smile.

“I love the kid already,” Gibson said. “He’s such a ball of life. When you’re around young guys who have so much to bring to the table, so much energy and joy, you want to be a part of that. He understands the new situation, but every day he’s one of the first guys speaking up in the huddle, one of the first guys speaking up in film.”

On Monday, after a team practice, Poole remained on the court, flanked by assistant coach David Vanterpool and several members of the development staff, for individual shooting work. After Poole finished with his array of 3-point shots and midrange jumpers, the group gathered for shots from midcourt. When player development coordinator and video coordinator Joe Ajike sank an attempt from 47 feet, Poole broke into a wide smile and hollered.

A few minutes later, still dripping sweat, Poole sat down for an interview. Yes, the team has been competitive during practices, he said, but he added that a little bit of fun now and then is important, too.

“It’s going to be tough no matter what, but we’re all here together,” Poole said. “Just feel comfortable enough to be yourself. I think that’s something that I’m trying to push towards for everybody else: ‘Be you.’ It takes more energy to be somebody else than it does to be you. And as long as our team knows that, we can live with everybody being themselves. We know how to go about that.

“Whether it’s a huddle, whether it’s practice, whether it’s the weight room — I’m trying to put on good music and just enjoy being around each other, honestly. We have a really, really, really good group, and that’s just from (everyone’s) personalities. That’s just from who they are as people, who they are as players. Very seldom do you get a collective good group of guys like we do right now, and it’s pretty cool.”

Poole has not played a single regular-season minute for Washington yet, but he already is one of the team’s most recognizable players. On Oct. 6, as individual Wizards players were introduced prior to an open scrimmage inside the Entertainment & Sports Arena, a crowd of 1,000 middle-school students in the stands saved their loudest cheers for Poole.

Poole is well known because the Warriors occupy an outsized role within the NBA landscape and because he was an important part of the Warriors’ run to the 2021-22 title, averaging 17.0 points per game during those playoffs.

But he gained unwelcome notoriety last October when Green punched him in the jaw during a Golden State practice. All season long, the reverberations from that punch thrust Poole and Green into a bright spotlight and, as Kerr acknowledged in May, hurt the Warriors’ chemistry.

The altercation with Green is not a subject Poole dwells on publicly. In July, after his trade to the Wizards became official, Poole was asked to assess how much Green’s punch impacted Golden State. Poole answered politely, “We’re in Washington now. Playing with Kuz, a great duo. Being able to really flourish, expand your game and help a new team, lead an entire group of guys. It’s a challenge that we’re up for. We’ve got a new front office and there’s a lot of people that’s invested. Everybody is locked in, wants to be here and start something that we can have that can be special.”

Poole will receive less attention this season than he encountered throughout his four-year Warriors tenure. Washington and its suburbs form a large market that devoured top-notch basketball when the Washington Bullets and the Georgetown Hoyas, Maryland Terrapins and Virginia Cavaliers were at their peaks, but basketball in the region is in a down cycle compared to the heyday of the late 1970s and 1980s. Winger was hired to revitalize the Wizards and make them relevant again.

There will be tough stretches. Poole recognizes that. But at least he has some experience in that area; during his rookie season, with Curry and Thompson dealing with injuries, Golden State posted a 15-50 record in the truncated COVID season. Kuzma and Jones also endured losing seasons early in their careers.

“We’ve played high-level basketball enough to the point where we know it’s not always going to be a smooth, easy transition,” Poole said. “There will be down days, dog days, slow days. It’s a long season, seven or eight months. But we know that those are the days where you get better: the hardest days, the days where we’re super-tired. Everybody’s going to come with energy during training camp. Everybody’s going to have a lot of positive energy the first month or month and a half of the season.

“When December or January comes around and it’s cold and it’s dark outside and you’re only getting six hours of sunlight, those are the days where the season really starts and you really start to build the foundation. And me, Kuz and Tyus, we know that. So if we can just continue to build everybody else up through those days, it’ll start to trickle, have a domino effect, and that’ll be another building block that we put down.”

Poole has played in four career regular-season games at Capital One Arena in downtown D.C., and he said he has always loved the fans’ energy there. To be sure, that energy mostly stemmed from Warriors fans in the crowd or from people who clamored to see Curry play.

And now, for the immediate future, it’s on Poole, Kuzma and Jones, as the team’s most recognizable players, to bring excitement back to the Wizards, to give fans a reason to buy tickets and watch the games on TV.

“We all love to play the game and we’re young and we have a lot of energy and we’re excited,” Poole said. “I think that’s just something to get behind. You can get behind a youthful and joyful spirit — you know, just like the enjoyment of playing basketball. We would love to go out and win 82 games. It probably won’t happen. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t have joy just playing the game. So, we want everybody else to see that.”

Poole will have a larger role with the Wizards than he had with the Warriors. Unseld said Poole will have the ball in his hands more often but also must place more of an emphasis on playing sound defense. As Dawkins has said, Poole also has to make sure he hunts the right shots rather than hoist shots indiscriminately and, along with Kuzma, make efforts to involve the team’s less experienced players.

“His next progression is just making others better, because when he has the ball, people are going to know he wants to shoot and score, and that’s OK,” Kuzma said. “That’s a good thing because that means your teammates are going to be more open from a defensive perspective. So he’s going to be great. This is his first time in this type of role. Playing off the ball for so many years, it’s going to take some time. But he’s young and he loves the game. He loves his craft.”

Jones said of Poole: “His confidence is unwavering.”

Wednesday night offered a tantalizing preview of what Poole can accomplish when he is at his best. He starred in the Wizards’ 131-106 preseason victory at Madison Square Garden. In 27 minutes, he scored 41 points on 10-of-19 shooting from the field. He was not shy. He made a pair of 3-pointers from 28 feet.

Unseld has referred to Poole as “a basketball junkie, a relentless worker” who is “wise beyond his years.”

Poole stressed that a sense of responsibility has to come from everyone, but he added he cherishes the opportunity to be one of the faces of a franchise. He always figured that chance would come, but he did not expect it to occur so early in his career.

He sounds as if he feels free. He noted he already has a championship ring, and he already has financial security, courtesy of the four-year contract extension worth a guaranteed $123 million that he signed last October. With all that accomplished, he said he can concentrate on a new challenge: helping to rebuild a franchise.

“In the four months that I’ve been here, it’s just cool,” he said. “It’s kind of like you’re painting your own canvas, essentially. You’ve got a blank canvas and you got 18 artists, and everybody gets to kind of paint their own picture. And at the end, we try to make it one (picture), which is cool.”

True, painting that picture will be a group effort.

But this season, Poole will have as much responsibility with the brush as anyone else on the roster.

(Top photo of Jordan Poole and Frank Ntilikina: Geoff Burke / USA Today)