New Orleans Pelicans Guard Jordan Poole Exits Early With Injury

The New Orleans Pelicans are starting to see the injury luck bite them again as Jordan Poole left Wednesday night's game against the Denver Nuggets early with an ankle injury.

Poole was already on the injury report prior to the game beginning with an illness and missed the first quarter entirely. He ended up playing seven minutes in the second before leaving the game and then being ruled out.

In his seven minutes, Poole was a +8 with two points, a rebound and a steal. The team said it was his left ankle, so this will be something to monitor. It could be any level of severity, so there will be an update as soon as information is available.

This is an unfortunate injury, as Poole was off to a much better start overall this year. His shots weren't falling, but pretty much everything else looked more solid. Going into the night, the team was 33.6 points better per 100 possessions with him on the court. It's a small sample size, but that was the best margin on the team.

This comes on the same day that Shamit Dua of In The No reported that Poole had told the team that he would be "open to opportunities elsewhere." A $30 million price tag was already going to make that difficult to happen, but perhaps a contender could be interested if the play continues to look solid towards the deadline. Any missed time would make that even less likely.

The addition of Bennedict Mathurin and the need for more Herb Jones minutes in the first place will make the hole easy to fill, but again Poole had been playing well on defense and was at least moving the ball on offense.