Jakob Poeltl, over the last few games, has seemingly realized a basketball truism that is, truthfully, innately present in over 99 percent of the population (and not just the basketball-playing portion of the population, I literally mean the entire population of earth): if you put the ball in the hole, your team gets two points.
That’s honestly the problem with some of this Euros that are now overrunning the league. They didn’t grow up with the game. They don’t understand the game on a basic level. They know how to play it in a technical, detached way, but they don’t FEEL the game. Poeltl has spent his whole career to this point just running around, thinking the ball was being passed around for fun and that sometimes it accidentally went into the orange ring puzzlingly perched 10 feet above the ground.
Next, someone should tell him that if you want to move around with the ball, you have to bounce it off the ground while doing so.
I don’t even want to know what his performances that featured more points than this look like. I made some videos for those games, they’re definitely in my archives, but a guy like Poeltl scoring 20-plus points while not realizing that he’s scoring any points at all is not something I want to see. I’ll stick with this one, where he’s attacking the rim with a PURPOSE that has literally never been present before about a week ago.