Yours truly built a bracket around the most important question of the Two-Timelines era. It’s not about who was the best, but who did you believe in the mosst? Eight ex-Warriors drafted after Kevin Durant left. Three rounds. One crown. I seeded it by emotional gravity: draft expectations, peak belief, and how long you kept the faith. And now the voting starts.
First matchup: the #1 seed Jordan Poole against the #8 seed Alen Smailagic.
I was in Las Vegas for Summer League 2019 when Jordan Poole first
put on a Warriors uniform. KD had just left. Kawhi and PG had just linked up in LA. The dynasty felt like it was genuinely over. And in the middle of all that noise, this 19-year-old kid from Michigan with a quick trigger and absolutely zero fear was out there getting buckets like the scoreboard owed him money.
I wrote about him that summer. I stayed high on him even when most people weren’t sure. Then the G League bubble happened in 2021 and everything changed. Pre-bubble, he was averaging 5.5 points on 42.6% shooting in under 10 minutes a game. Post-bubble, he was up to 14.7 points on 43.3% in 23.5 minutes. Same player, more runway, and that’s all he needed.
Dr. Tom and I wrote a whole season review for the legendary Warriors publication Dub Nation HQ about how Jordan Poole had arrived. By the end of the 2020-21 season, he was drawing shooting fouls at a slightly higher rate than Steph Curry. Steve Kerr said he gets places most players can’t get to. We compared him to Leandro Barbosa as a compliment. We meant it.
And then 2022 happened and it wasn’t the Barbosa ceiling anymore.
Four 20-point games off the bench in the playoffs at age 22 proved he was the sparkplug the Warriors needed to keep their offense rolling. He started showing out on the biggest stages, with no hesitation, serving up Poole Parties to defenders when the franchise needed him most. Dub Nation didn’t just believe Jordan Poole was good, we believed Jordan Poole was going to be the one who kept all of this going after Steph. The dream was that he’d evolve into some kind of Steph clone. And can you blame us? The slippery handles, the outrageous shotmaking, the dead-eye free throws in addition to watching the student take buzzer beaters from the master IN THE ACTUAL NBA FINALS. The next chapter wrote itself in our heads.
Then October 5, 2022 happened in practice.
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the punch at the time, and honestly I’m still not. What I do know is that the season that followed was the most complicated thing I’ve ever had to cover as a Warriors writer. Poole played all 82 games. He averaged 20.4 points, 4.5 assists, 87% from the free throw line. Without Curry in the lineup, he averaged 26.1 points and 5 assists per game.
But then he’d have games where the turnovers were genuinely indefensible. Games where his shot chart looked like it was affiliated with the Bloods; his playoff shot chart had so much red on it that it was genuinely alarming. In the 2023 playoffs against the Lakers, he shot 34% from the field and 25% from three.
Steph got ejected throwing his mouthguard in pure frustration after a Poole decision in a must-win game. Klay could only watch in horror; he finally ran into someone with less of a conscience than the Splash Bros.
That summer, young Poole was traded to Washington for Chris Paul.
I wrote a season review about that too at DNHQ titled “How Jordan Poole’s Warriors Tenure Ended.” I tried to be fair. I noted that he was only 23. I noted that the turnovers made more sense when you realized he was a young guard on a defending-champion team where everyone had him circled. I noted that the same things that made him infuriating (the shot selection, the individual creation, the relentless ball-in-hands approach) were the exact same things that made him great without Steph.
The community poll at the end of that piece asked readers to grade his final season. Fifteen percent of respondents chose “F – I see why Draymond punched him.”
That’s the Poole story. That’s the whole thing. Not that he failed. It’s that we watched him arrive, we watched him ascend, we watched him win a championship, we watched the whole thing catch fire from the inside, and then we watched him leave at 23 years old with the best basketball of his life theoretically still ahead of him.
That’s why he’s the 1 seed. The peak belief was enormous. The confusing grief was real. And the fall hurt in a way that Dub Nation hasn’t fully processed even now.
Alen Smailagic was 18 years old when he played in the G League for Santa Cruz in 2018, the youngest player in the history of the league. He came over from Belgrade having played above the Serbian semi-professional third division and not much else. They called him Smiley.
The Warriors traded up to get him 39th overall in 2019 and gave him a four-year, $6.13 million contract. And for a moment a real, genuine, Warriors-fan-Twitter moment it looked like the investment might pay off. Draymond adopted him as a pet project, gushing about how quickly Smiley learned and how inquisitive he was.
The front office floated the vision of him as a pick-and-pop forward in the Davis Bertans mold, a 6’10” shooter who could put the ball on the floor and make plays from the arc.
The flashes were real. His shooting motion was fluid. His 84% free throw percentage as a rookie was a legitimately good sign for long-term development. He could put the ball on the floor in almost guard-like fashion for a center. There were moments in Santa Cruz where you could start to see the shape of what the Warriors were building toward.
But there were also the turnovers. The happy feet on defense. The 223 total minutes in a Warriors uniform across two full seasons. The G League bubble in 2021 where his Santa Cruz coach Kris Weems had to pull him aside and tell him flat out: “You can’t try to score every time you touch the ball.” The late-March start against Memphis where he played eight minutes, shot 1-for-5, and committed five fouls. The $1.78 million salary about to become guaranteed. The quiet August waiver wire move that most Warriors fans barely registered.
Connor Letourneau wrote the obituary in the Chronicle before it was officially over: “Even projects must show progress.”
That was it. He went back to Europe, building a career entirely on his own terms. Just a kid who came to the Bay at 18, learned English, learned the freeway, and went home when the NBA dream ran out of runway.
“I really would like to stay in the NBA and not just be on the bench,” Smailagić said one day after he was drafted. “I really want to play.” And Smiley played a little bit in his time with the Dubs. We just watched and hoped, and for a little while that was enough.
