Stop the presses! The Washington Wizards have traded for a first-round pick. And more importantly, Chris Paul will be headed to help an old thorn in his side, the Golden State Warriors. The Athletic’s Shams Charania is reporting the Warriors are sending Jordan Poole, a protected 2030 first-round pick and a 2027 second-round pick to Washington in exchange for Paul.
Warriors are sending Jordan Poole, a protected first-round pick in 2030 and a second-rounder in 2027 to the Wizards for Chris Paul, league sources said. https://t.co/GLCIS0bDsg
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) June 22, 2023
Golden State is also trading 2022 second-rounder Ryan Rollins to Washington as part of Poole-CP3 deal, sources said. https://t.co/sI1L23FPrE
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) June 22, 2023
For years on the court, Steph Curry and the Warriors terrorized Paul, who was consistently thwarted when he was with the LA Clippers and the Houston Rockets. Now, he’ll try to help this core of players win their fifth NBA championship and finally get his first title. For the Wizards, the exodus continues as they seem to make a trade every day in the Michael Winger front-office era, but this time some long-term tangible assets are coming back to them.
Let’s bust out the red pen and slap some grades on this trade.
Warriors’ acquisition of Chris Paul
This is a fascinating deal for the Warriors on a few levels. First, let’s get into the basketball side of it.
How does Paul fit into what the Warriors do on the court?
One of their biggest issues last season was the regression of Poole (we’ll get into that in a second). The Warriors didn’t consistently have an offensive force running things when Curry was on the sidelines. It’s always an adventure for the Warriors when Curry leaves a game, but the offensive production fell by 7.7 points per 100 possessions last season whenever Curry was on the bench. It was 6.0 points per 100 possessions higher with Poole on the bench than it was with him in the game. A lot of that is the Curry dynamic on/off numbers.
In the playoffs, those numbers were astronomically worse. In 13 postseason games, the offense dropped by 24.2 points per 100 possessions without Curry in the game. It was less dramatic with Poole’s numbers with it being just 3.8 points per 100 possessions worse with Poole in the game than without him. That’s because they tried to pair him with Curry as much as possible in the shorter rotation.
CP3’s ability to run an offense should fix that, except the style of Paul and the style of the Warriors clashes quite a bit. Paul loves a slow-paced, methodical dissection on offense that leads to a lot of pick-and-roll (sometimes good) and isolation mismatches against switches. The Warriors play with flow and pace and ball movement when things are running smoothly. Media superstar Jason Concepcion compared the clash in styles between a player and a team acquiring said player to when Shaquille O’Neal joined the Phoenix Suns.
From the Poole standpoint, we’ll now find out if the reasons for last season’s inconsistency and poor play with him on the floor had to do with a regression in his game or maybe it had everything to do with Green punching Poole in a practice and the video leaking to the public. The culture of the Warriors seemed shaken last season after the incident. And maybe a regression was always going to happen. Maybe the Warriors had a fluke title run the previous season or it was just natural to see things regress to the mean.
However, comments all season long seemed to suggest nothing was ever smoothed over. Poole became a bloated contract without any level of consistency. He was a disaster in the postseason, shooting 34.1 percent from the field and needing 135 shot attempts to score 134 playoff points. It was nothing like what we saw in the season of the title run. Poole becoming a horrendous contract the Warriors needed to eradicate from their books was both financial in these new punitive luxury tax levels of the collective bargaining agreement times and basketball-driven because you’d never choose him over trying to keep Green.
It’s a necessary move, but we don’t know if the styles will acclimate to each other. At least they’re off the hook for the money to Poole and CP3 can be a steadier hand off the bench, as long as his 38-year-old body holds up. Now we see if this is essentially culture addition by subtraction.
Grade: B
Wizards get Jordan Poole, Ryan Rollins, a protected 2030 first-rounder, a 2027 second-rounder
The Wizards finally acquired a first-round pick from the Bradley Beal trade! It just took moving Paul for a young guard making a lot of money.
In all seriousness, let’s see what all of this could mean for the Wizards moving forward. Poole is the perfect type of player for a tanking team. He’s going to take a lot of shots, have complete freedom within the offense, have zero expectations for producing winning basketball and his scoring numbers will be phenomenal. He could easily score 25 points per game next season and that might be underselling it. He’ll give the fan base plenty of highlights, and that can distract from just how bad the overall basketball of this team might be.
Poole isn’t a lost cause by any means. There is real talent there, but the cloak of the Warriors’ success and system won’t be there to hide his flaws anymore. The spotlight becomes dimmer, which is good, but bad habits can be accentuated in the chaotic environment of rebuilding. Wes Unseld Jr. and company finding ways to hone his skills will be important for how bad of a contract this might be for them.
Some of the pushback on the Beal trade and the Kristaps Porziņģis trades this week were responses to how good it was for the Wizards to clear the books of the Beal money. And there’s some real truth to that. No sense in paying big money to a player like Beal when you want a fresh start, and he wasn’t leading you to wins in the first place. The criticism was never about getting rid of Beal. It was about the lack of return for him. Pick swaps and second-rounders seemed unbefitting of his talent when Jrue Holiday and Rudy Gobert have gone for insane amounts of first-round picks, no-trade clause or not.
If you’re worried about clearing the books for the future of this franchise, I’m not sure that $125 million for Poole over the next four years is going to solve that. You have to be convinced that Poole is a future part of this franchise or someone who can redeem his trade value enough in justifying his contract at some point that you can flip him for something good. Both seem murky to me, but that’s not my job. That’s on the Wizards.
Getting a protected first-round pick from the Warriors in 2030 is important. The Warriors likely won’t be contending at that point unless they are truly ahead, and we have no idea what’s coming seven years from now. This could end up being a valuable pick for the Wizards or a trade chip or a pick that has protections that lessen as time goes on beyond 2030.
Grade: B-minus
Related reading
Harper: Instant reaction with Smart, Porziņģis on the move
Hollinger: Why Porziņģis-Smart trade is a win for Grizzlies, Celtics and Wizards
(Photo of Chris Paul and Jordan Poole: Mark J. Rebilas / USA Today)
Warriors-Wizards trade grades: Instant reaction with Chris Paul, Jordan Poole on the move - The Athletic
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