It’s never a good thing when both of your superstars are trending on social media after another loss. This has become the norm for Jordan Poole and Kyle Kuzma. Their first brush with infamy occurred when Poole gave Kuzma an oops of the panel while losing by 20. Together, they are the Bennifer professional basketball. They are an unholy basketball marriage, characterized by inconveniences, terrible chemistry on the court, producers of poor box office statistics, but who consider themselves megastars in the making. On Monday night, the Raptors trailed the Wizards by 16 with 7:25 left in regulation. Around that time, the Wizards staged a major breakdown and never made another basket during Toronto’s 19-1 run that followed.
This season, the duo of Kuzma and Poole has a net rating of minus-23.4. This is the lowest net rating in the league for two-way combinations that have played at least 150 minutes together. The worst part is that they are so overpaid that they will probably come back for a repeat in case they end up with a weak draft like the 1989-90 Nets and draft the next Derrick Coleman instead of a cornerstone of the championship. Sometimes respectable players end up on a team that doesn’t fit in and end up in the cellar Baron Davis and Clippers led by Al Thornton. This team also included Zach Randolph, who was the laughing stock of the league until reforming with Memphis. But historically bad duos are something else entirely.
Kuzma and Poole aren’t developmental players on rookie contracts like last year’s Houston Rockets or the pre-Embiid Process era Sixers. This offseason, Kuzma signed a four-year, $90 million extension with the Wizards. Poole is in the first year of a $128 million extension he signed with Golden State. He has even given up on any attempts at grooming, a symbolic representation of the level of neglect he brings to the table.
The Wizards moved Chris Paul into his next life as Jordan Poole’s backup instead of keeping him as a veteran so they could hit rock bottom and have everything go as planned. In the annals of professional basketball, Poole and Kuzma create a masterpiece of traumatic basketball. There have been lousier teams to dress together, but for their two top scorers to also be monumental idiots is a higher level of ineptitude. Night after night, Poole and Kuzma provide low points for everyone. This season, Poole is shooting 30 percent from distance, well below the league average. Kuzma may still have some trade value, but he’s a stickler who occasionally takes some of the poorest shots.
Whether Poole distracted by conversations during downtime and linger to catch up on what has been written or Kuzma throws an airball after Jordan Poole falls to his knees while trying to push the perimeter, Jrue Holiday, they look like the future first ballot Bad Basketball Hall of Fame inducted.
The aforementioned Zach Randolph and Eddy Curry were horrible for the Knicks, but that experiment ended after one season. In 50 games together, they tested the limits of how many one-dimensional big men who eschew conditioning can man the low post at a time and rack up a -14.6 net rating. For years, Andre Drummond and Greg Monroe had the Pistons running through quicksand. At worst, Monroe and Drummond clogged the lane and temporarily teamed up with Josh Smith to form one of the worst trios in the NBA. But big men don’t control the ball like a pair of ill-fitting guards.
The Monta Ellis and Brandon Jennings tandem got lost in history because the Bucks were lucky enough to grab Giannis Antetokounmpo in the middle of the first round in 2013, but for a brief period they were a dark cloud over- above the Bucks. Ellis was Poole’s precursor. A volume shooter who was so full of himself, he said Mercury news that he couldn’t coexist with Steph Curry. Mind you, this was the underdeveloped, pre-musked Curry Room, but it still provides a connection across generations. Even though Poole never explicitly said he couldn’t play with Curry, he had a penchant for frustrating Draymond Green and the double MVP.
Ironically, Ellis seemed to find a kindred spirit in Jenkins. Between 2011 and 2013, Ellis and Jennings played in 101 games and never accumulated a positive plus-minus rating on the field. However, they at least managed to scrape together an eighth seed thanks to the duo’s offensive fireworks.
Incompetence is Washington’s problem. They play at one of the fastest tempos in the league, which has convinced them to play basketball in a hurry and make frantic mistakes. An eighth seed like Ellis and Jennings would be even more painful than the reality of knowing that this disaster class sshould have been executed a year earlier. In the pantheon of bad duos, Kuzma and Poole run away with the tag team belt.
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