Jordan “The Poole Noodle” continues his stretch of vastly improved play with a seventeen-point outing against Kawhi Leonard and the Los Angeles Clippers. Aside from his zero-point effort two games ago against the Raptors, he has now scored in double digits in fourteen straight games. At the beginning of the season, the only way he could ever get to double digits was if he chucked fifteen shots and made four of them. And he did that often.
Maybe I shouldn’t be focusing on raw point totals when assessing player quality over a stretch of time. That sends the wrong message to young viewers who might be pursuing higher levels of basketball in the future. Rather than going off something basic like “double digit games”, I should at least be looking at something like “games shooting over 40% from the field”, which doesn’t seem like a high bar but was definitely a high bar for the Poole Noodle earlier in the season.
In that same stretch of fourteen games where Poole has been so successful in scoring the ball, nine of those games saw him shoot above 40% from the field. For comparison, he shot above 40% from the field only four times in the calendar year 2019. That’s nuts. Absolutely nuts. Poole’s improvement has been staggering, honestly. I’m staggering around my apartment right now, bumping into furniture and knocking stuff over, because of how staggering that is.