Evaluating Jordan Poole’s True Trade Value

Wizards’ Biggest Name Who Could Be Traded

• G Jordan Poole

If Poole’s time in Golden State was a roller coaster, his stint in Washington is a Tilt-a-Whirl: There’s been a lot of spin. 

After the Warriors were eliminated from the 2023 playoffs, Poole told Logan Murdock of The Ringer that he didn’t see why he wouldn’t return to the Warriors.

“It wasn’t a bad year. I mean, career highs in two categories,” Poole said back in May after a season where he saw slight upticks in points per game (18.5 to 20.4) and assists per game (4.0 to 4.5) while also setting a career-high in turnovers and recording his lowest PER and field goal percentage since his rookie campaign.

Amazingly, just two months later, Poole was traded to the Wizards.

Four months after the trade, Poole introduced himself at Wizards Media Day, discussing his insights into “what it takes to build a championship culture.”

During the second day of Wizards training camp, Poole reunited with Murdock and explained that in preparation for his lead role in Washington, he had been watching Navy SEAL training videos during the offseason to study how to lead troops.

Minutes after his one-on-one with Murdock, Poole was scheduled to close out the practice by speaking with the remainder of the media (including FortyEightMinutes), though instead of standing with the group of media as his coach and teammate did, Poole asked a staffer for a chair to sit down.

A half-dozen iPhones were pointing down at Poole, recording his boastful words about leadership when a test of the National Emergency Alert System set the devices off, leading Poole to joke that they were ringing for his arrival in Washington.

Allow me to editorialize here: the scene at the Wizards practice facility wasn’t that serious.

Most everyone was laughing with the 24-year-old guard and it had a first-week-of-school vibe to it (as many training camps do). It was less than a week into the Wizards formally ushering in the Poole era and some might say that scene, along with the team-run fashion show the following night, would be a foreshadowing of just how unserious Poole’s debut run with Washington would eventually be.

When evaluating trade value and long-term player projections, antidotes such as Poole’s kickoff in D.C. certainly play a role.

Rival executives might not be in the building every day but there’s plenty of talk around the league in an attempt to gather accurate intel. Executives take note of how players handle themselves in a league with ever-changing situations; Poole’s ongoing scouting report has many chapters.

Poole later describing his arrival in D.C. to Yahoo Sports as a “good situation” to “just kind of have [his] own team” and “play [his] own type of basketball” didn’t go unnoticed around the league.

Poole’s lamenting that he previously “had to fit into the mold” that the Warriors already established in Golden State also didn’t go unnoticed.

That mold produced four championships and six NBA Finals appearances. As of this writing, Poole’s “type of basketball” has produced a total of six regular season wins in Washington.

Less than two weeks after Poole’s comments, there were leaks to well-established national NBA reporters that the Wizards didn’t view Poole as a “cornerstone player” and that the team acquired the point guard in an attempt to rehabilitate his trade value.

Poole had recorded a positive raw plus-minus on just six occasions, resulting in four of Washington’s wins. Through 26 appearances where Poole posted a negative plus-minus, the Wizards are 2-24.

Most statistics should be seen as a means of filtering information rather than a direct line to a conclusion. However, more context behind the plus-minus data here does Poole no favors.

Four of Poole’s top games for the Wizards occurred during wins against:

• The Grizzlies without Ja Morant, leaving 35-year-old Derrick Rose to get significant run.
• The Pistons midway through their historic losing streak.
• The Pacers in their first regular season contest coming off of their In-Season Tournament championship game appearance in Las Vegas.
• The Trail Blazers in a game where the Wizards nearly blew a double-digit fourth-quarter lead.

Through 32 games as a Wizard, Poole owns negative 1.0 win shares, which aside from rookie Scoot Henderson is the lowest mark among the 520 NBA players to see action this season, according to Basketball Reference ⁰¹.

Subscribers to Basketball Reference’s win share stat might tell you that means he’s actively taking wins off the table for the Wizards (as few as there were expected to be). Don’t like win shares or plus-minus? There’s a plethora of other performance metrics that tell the same story. Regardless of whether you like numbers or not, it’s safe to say that Poole isn’t producing as a leading option on an NBA team.

The narrative around Poole shifted from a rising leader to a player deserving of intense public criticism to the point where some may deem it as an act of bullying ⁰².

It now feels a little Grinch-y outlining Poole’s figures. After all, honesty without compassion is cruelty (and I’m sure there’s a sense of apprehension when the Wizards’ PR staff include Poole’s figures as they send postgame statistical highlights to the media on a nightly basis).

To be objective, there is an element of enabling here by the Wizards.

Poole might have believed that he was a rising NBA superstar ready to lead a team to success with his “type of basketball,” though it’s difficult to believe that the Wizards’ decision-makers ever truly did.

Inferring Washington’s Poole Experiment Goals

There’s documented research suggesting that the traits that Poole showcased in Golden State would never translate to true stardom on his own.

In 2010, economists David J Berri and Martin B. Schmidt produced research accounting for what factors produce NBA wins in their 2010 book: Stumbling on Wins.

Taking the inverse of the research, you could easily derive what accounts for losing.

Some time has passed since Stumbling on Wins was published and it’s certainly not the only published research on the subject. Although, Dean Oliver, who is widely known as one of the greatest statistical minds to pour his talents into basketball, is credited with contributing research to the book. Coincidentally, Oliver spent three seasons on the Wizards’ staff from 2020-2023.

Admittedly, the table above is a simplified version of the sophisticated research. Still, it’s easy to infer why the Wizards would allow Poole to spread his wings during a season that the front office has deemed as a tanking “reshaping” campaign.

At least two of the franchise’s objectives with the Poole era are clear:

1. Sink further down the NBA’s standings to gain better placement in the 2024 NBA draft lottery, which will ultimately yield the franchise its best draft pick since the early 2010s (the Wizards lose their 2024 first-round pick if it doesn’t fall within the top 12)⁰³.
2. Continue to portray and operate the franchise as a player-friendly destination.

By the time the 2024 trade deadline arrives, the Wizards will have played 50 games and will likely be on target to achieve item No. 1. With item No. 2, it’s harder to project exactly what success looks like.

It’s no secret that the Wizards are aiming to become a