In previous NBA generations, a player like Jonathan Kuminga — with his 99th-percentile athleticism and top-flight scoring potential at just 22 years old — would have a nine-figure contract right now. But the old days are over. The new collective bargaining agreement is contributing to a market in which restricted free agents like Kuminga are feeling the collective squeeze of penny-pinching, tax-terrified teams almost entirely devoid of cap space.
Kuminga’s value is hard to define, even broadly, given his inconsistent role and production with the Warriors over the first four years of his career. The few teams with enough cap space to offer Kuminga a contract that would’ve forced the Warriors to either match or let him go didn’t do so, and so now the Warriors are holding the cards with a $7.9 million qualifying offer and a reported two-year, $45 million contract on the table.
Kuminga, understandably, doesn’t like either of those options. If he takes the qualifying offer he would set up to be an unrestricted free agent next summer, but what if he suffers a major injury this season before securing his first long-term NBA payday? What if his role is a mess with the Warriors again and nobody has any better idea how to properly valuate him next summer than they do right now?
Sign and trades were on the table. The Suns have made a push. The Kings have reportedly offered Kuminga a $63 million deal with Malik Monk and a lottery-protected 2030 first-round pick going back to the Warriors, who in turn want the protections lifted off that pick. The Warriors, however, are reportedly no longer interested in sign-and-trade situations involving Kuminga.
Oh, and there’s also this bit of news from the “stop traffic if you’ve heard this before” files: According to ESPN’s Shams Charania, the Warriors are one of the teams positioning themselves for a run at Giannis Antetokounmpo should he become available, and Kuminga, on a trade-friendly contract, would presumably need to be a part of that package.
If you find it, shall we say, incongruent that the Warriors think Kuminga is good enough to be a key piece of a trade package for one of the five best players in the world while also not good enough to even crack their playoff rotation short of a break-glass emergency, well, you’re not alone.
Herein lies the problem. The Warriors are valuing Kuminga like the player they know he could become, with the great irony being the Warriors might be the reason he hasn’t, in fact, become that player. Kuminga believes he can become a star outside the constraints of a team in contention — which is to say a team that is going to let him be an offensive focal point. He might be right. There’s probably a better chance he’s wrong.
But nobody can say for sure until he’s had a proper chance to spread his wings in a role suited to his strengths with the freedom to play through mistakes. The Warriors haven’t given him that. It’s not to say they’ve done anything wrong. They haven’t. When you have Stephen Curry, you design everything and everyone in support of him.
The ones who who blossom inside the maze of Curry’s movement really blossom. Klay Thompson became a Hall of Famer because he isn’t wired as a self creator and can shoot the lights out. Kuminga is wired as a self creator, and he’s not a shooter. Draymond Green turned into a player nobody saw coming because he is, it turns out, an elite conductor who makes Golden State’s otherwise messy movement look positively organized. Kuminga isn’t that, either.
The closest comp to what the Warriors have long wanted to Kuminga to be is Andrew Wiggins, an elite athlete who embraced rebounding, defense and selective scoring as arguably the second-best player on the 2022 title team. But how was Kuminga supposed to become this younger, upgraded version of Andrew Wiggins when the Warriors had — for the first three-and-a-half years of Kuminga’s career — the actual Andrew Wiggins?
Also, don’t forget about the first five years of Wiggins’ career in Minnesota. He got his chance to be a focal point and learned the hard way how hard that kind of responsibility actually is, so that by the time he wound up on the Warriors he was ready to embrace a new role on his own terms.
Same thing with Aaron Gordon, another good Kuminga comp who has, in context, become one of the league’s most valuable players as a jack-of-all-trades super athlete in Denver. Gordon defends. Rebounds. Cuts. Allows Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray to absorb the defensive attention then slips into all the right cracks for lobs and open 3-pointers. He also came to this role after five plus years in Orlando as a go-to guy. Like Wiggins, he was able to get the star ambition out of his system before maturing into the player he was perhaps always meant to be.
It’s not wrong that Kuminga wants the opportunity to test out of the level at which the Warriors have effectively kept him, and it’s not wrong that the Warriors haven’t been able to give him that consistent opportunity. This is one of those stories with two entirely reasonable sides. Kuminga needs consistent on-the-job training, but the Warriors are not a team in a position to prioritize prospect growth over performance. This is a team with a closing title window and an extremely thin margin for error. Kuminga, for all his abilities, makes a lot of errors.
He also does things nobody else on the team can do, and that includes Curry and Jimmy Butler, the guy who basically glued Kuminga to the bench after Steve Kerr decided the two of them couldn’t operate well enough together. Nobody on Golden State’s roster can attack downhill, or vertically, like Kuminga, who has a couple scoring spots from which he is almost unstoppable if given the consistent opportunity to pursue them.
Say what you want about his deficiencies, but there are only a handful of people in the world who can pop into an NBA playoff game after weeks of riding the pine and start handing out buckets the way Kuminga did against the Wolves last May after Curry got hurt. Even Butler was taking a backseat to him. He was the go-to scorer, no bones about it, and for extended stretches he was largely up to the task.
And now he’s just supposed to go back to the bench? On a cut-rate contract, no less? That’s a lot to ask of a 22-year-old who believes he’s been boxed in, but for the time being it appears this is a saga that will continue into at least the start of the season as Tim Kawakami reported on Monday that Kuminga “won’t be traded this summer.”
“He’ll be back on the Warriors’ roster to start the season,” Kawakami wrote, citing a team source. “And it’ll either come when he signs the Warriors’ offer or accepts the $7.9 million one-year qualifying offer.”
Whatever the deal looks like, it certainly wouldn’t appear that Kuminga wants to be with the Warriors for one minute longer than he has to, which would make the first few months of the season, until Kuminga would be trade eligible in mid-December, an audition. And that, in the end, is the common ground between player and team. Kuminga needs to play well enough that his value rises to a point where the Warriors can trade him for what they believe to be a proper return, and if he plays that well, he’ll help the Warriors immensely until he is finally able to get that fresh start that he is obviously, and understandably, seeking.