New Orleans Pelicans guard Jordan Poole has missed over a month of the season with a quad injury, but is finally nearing a return to the court.
Poole showed up on the injury report one day and has now been gone for 18 games. There has been a ton of confusion among fans about what has actually happened to him and the timeline that has followed.
About 10 days after his last game, on November 14, the Pelicans announced that he was diagnosed with a quad strain and that he would be re-evaluated in a week. Around 10 days later, New Orleans announced that Poole had been cleared for on-court basketball activities.
There has been no official release made since November 24, but James Borrego has talked about it a couple of times. A few days after being cleared, the guard was still not taking on contact in practice. Now, on December 9, Borrego gave his best update yet:
"It's pretty close, I mean it feels that way. We had him out there today, a little bit more. My goal is that he gets a full practice in tomorrow. We'll have a better sense tomorrow after he goes through a full practice."
Poole is averaging 17.3 points, 1.7 rebounds and 3.4 assists on 35.4/33.9/96.9 shooting splits over seven games this year. It wasn't a great start, but it's a small sample size while the team was finding almost nothing to work for them. He should be a much better fit in the new Borrego offense when he gets back.