The daily guessing games such as Wordle, Mathler and Globle that have become a part of internet conversation have reached the NBA, and a former Utah Runnin’ Utes star is right in the middle of it.
Get to know Poeltl, the daily game named after former Ute Jakob Poeltl — now of the San Antonio Spurs — in which you have eight tries to figure out the mystery NBA player.
How to play Poeltl
In Poeltl, there are eight categories: Player name, team, conference, division, position, height, age and jersey number.
Like with Wordle, users guess an NBA player, and categories will either appear in green, yellow or no color.
Green means the guess is exactly right, yellow means it’s close in some manner (more on that in the next paragraph) and no color means it’s completely off.
In Poeltl, yellow in the team color means the player played for that squad at some point previously but doesn’t currently, yellow in the position column means it’s partially correct (think if a player is considered a guard-forward and you’ve guessed just guard) and yellow in either the height, age or jersey number column means the right answer is within two of the guess (for example, if you’ve guessed the player is 6-foot-8 but the correct answer is 6-foot-10).
A unique feature in Poeltl is that at any point, you can click to have a silhouette of the player appear to help you, and that does not count toward your six guesses.
Jakob Poeltl update
In his sixth season in the NBA and fourth with the Spurs (he was taken ninth overall in the 2016 NBA draft by the Toronto Raptors and played his first two seasons for them before being part of the trade that sent Kawhi Leonard from the Spurs to the Raptors), Poeltl is having a career year.
He has started 49 of 50 games and is averaging 13.4 points, 9.2 rebounds 2.9 assists and 1.8 blocks in 29.1 minutes per contest.
At the trade deadline earlier this month, there were reports that teams were offering San Antonio a first-round pick to acquire him, but he was not moved.
Last week in a 157-153 double overtime loss to fellow former Runnin’ Ute Kyle Kuzma and the Washington Wizards, Poeltl nearly tallied a triple-double with 28 points, 11 rebounds and eight assists.