It’s been fun watching Jordan Poole miss shots at a historic rate, but now I feel like it would be more fun to see him start making a bunch of shots instead. There’s a basic human psychological need to see balls go in holes. That’s why people watch basketball. And that’s why people (mostly) don’t watch basketball where the ball doesn’t go in the hole very often. Poole’s bricking wasn’t fun because of the bricks, but for the historical notability of it.
If his recent play is anything to go by, it looks like he’s getting back on track with his shot-making. Of course, he’s never actually been ON the track (at least not in the NBA, I assume he shot at least 35 percent in college since he’s here now), which makes it logically impossible for him to return to it; the only thing he can do is get onto it for the first time. So let’s say that’s what he’s doing.
21 points is a career-high, which at first glance seems almost self-evident, but believe it or not, he actually had a 20-burger fairly early in his career. It wasn’t as surprising for him to score that much as it is now; no one had yet realized how bad he was going to be at making the ball go in the hole. I’m hoping that this is just the beginning of a trend of improvement from him, so that he can maybe avoid the reputation as having one of the worst offensive seasons of all time, but if it’s not, I won’t be surprised. We have a large sample size of suck and a comparatively tiny sample size of non-suck.