Jordan Poole has resurrected Warriors' Death Lineup in a frightening NBA development

The Golden State Warriors are an avalanche when they get rolling, and they are rolling.

Keep the ball moving. Steal possessions and do not give them back. Play with pace. Force decisions until someone chooses wrong. Threes fall. Lanes open. Opponents fracture. The more momentum, the harder to stop. Meet the avalanche’s energy or cower in fear, whether you are rooting for destruction or in its path.

This is the flow the Golden State Warriors found with their Death Lineup in the 2015 NBA Finals, when they won their first championship. It is what fed their record-setting 73 regular-season wins during the 2015-16 season, what failed them in the 2016 Finals and what led them to Kevin Durant, who perfected the deluge.

The Warriors have found that flow again, only with third-year late-first-round draft pick Jordan Poole in place of a legend and Andrew Wiggins doing his best Andre Iguodala impersonation. Call it the Death Poole Lineup or whatever you want, the Warriors are destroying the Denver Nuggets with it, and the title is back in play.

As Denver’s Monte Morris said, “They’re out there laughing, dancing around. It’s just embarrassing.”

The five-man unit of Death Lineup holdovers Stephen Curry, Klay Thompsonand Draymond Green, along with Poole and Wiggins, played six minutes and 23 seconds of near-perfect basketball in Game 2 of their first-round series on Monday night. They scored 27 points on 11-for-12 shooting, assisting on 10 of those makes, flipping an eight-point deficit before halftime and punctuating a second straight blowout victory.

It was Curry’s miss on a contested sidestep 3-pointer at the end of the second quarter that reminded him the past two injury-plagued seasons are behind his Warriors. No longer does he have to carry them alone.

“I was thinking about that for a long time, just because the floor, the space, there were a lot of driving angles, even if you were not the one going to be finishing,” he told reporters following his 34-point effort in 23 minutes off the bench. “That’s when the reactions from the defense start, and we have so many shooters and playmakers out there. You kind of have to make them pay. That’s where all the flow starts to happen and all the good open shots — we love to play that way, and it’s demoralizing for a defense.”

The Warriors did not ask Poole to mirror Curry, because who would be so brash to believe it is possible to mold a respectable replica of a singular talent? Poole would be so brash. He witnessed how the threat of Curry’s shooting and his constant movement bend the defense, whether or not he possesses the ball, and how he lets defenders dictate decisions to fire at will, attack the basket, facilitate or cut and keep moving.

Poole has studied what makes Curry great, incorporated it into his practice and applied it on the biggest stage, fusing it with his own improvisational style, like how Miles Davis learned at the hand of Charlie Parker and made jazz music his own. Only Wilt Chamberlain scored more points than Poole’s 59 in his first two playoff games for the Warriors. As encouraging as Poole’s development has been, no one saw this coming.