Jordan Poole and Kyle Kuzma are continuing to play hilarious slapstick basketball for the apocalyptically bad Washington Wizards. Sunday, fresh off an improbable home win over the Indiana Pacers, the Wizards traveled to Phoenix to face the undermanned but very good Suns. Poole and Kuzma were in maximum Big Two mode, trying out all their bitchin' moves and seeking to prove they can go toe-to-toe with Devin Booker and Kevin Durant (they 100 percent cannot). The Wizards duo combined for 12 buckets on 39 shots, and made five of 22 three-point attempts, and in general looked like a pair of silly bozos.
Poole also turned the ball over four times, and all four of them were delightful. There was the time when he gathered an outlet pass a little too lazily and was startled by a nearby defender, so that he just dropped the ball and then stood there in blinking confusion as the Suns trotted into a cheap transition bucket. Then there was the time when he attempted to fire a bullet hit-ahead pass to a streaking teammate but threw the ball directly into the hands of Phoenix's Eric Gordon, leading to a Suns layup. Minutes later he dribbled his way into trouble on the left wing, pivoted, and threw a pick-six into the hands of Phoenix's Chimezie Metu.
But the best of these came in the third quarter, with the Wizards up 13 points and the Suns looking sloppy and discouraged. Booker missed a contested layup, Poole snagged the defensive rebound and raced the other way in transition. Durant set up to stop the ball at the top of the key, and three Wizards spread out alongside Poole. Poole, because he is a bad passer and a selfish shooter and a reckless decision-maker, pulled up for a deep three-pointer, which he missed. He also flopped on the play, hoping for a bailout from a referee, which never came. Suns big man Jusuf Nurkic gathered the rebound and threw a hasty outlet pass Durant's way, but the ball was batted away by Washington's Tyus Jones. It fell to Poole. Poole took a loping dribble to the exact spot where he'd just thrown himself on the floor, and that is where Jordan Poole encountered a Jordan pool:
Jordan Poole is a gift, a daily inspiration. He is proof that ambition and swagger and just a little luck can take a person a long, long way, so far beyond the functional limit of their capabilities that they might wake up one day into a wonderful world where they are being paid millions of dollars to do something that they are genuinely terrible at doing. The Wizards lost, by the way.
