It's hard to pinpoint the moment that Jonathan Kuminga first became disenchanted with the Golden State Warriors and their management, so we will have to start the clock with the trade demand that sparked the latest stage in their preposterous standoff. By that reckoning this is merely Day Two of Kuminga Held Hostage, and yes, it's already stupid.
But we all knew it would be. When a trade period begins with no trade, no predictions of a trade, and the advertised likelihood that no trade may happen until the summer, you've got something special. And by special we mean staggeringly tedious.
Kuminga and the Warriors have been a mismatched set almost since the day he was drafted. That was five years ago, and the only thing that has actually been accomplished over the course of that relationship is that Kuminga has four years into his pension. He was a central part of the team's two-track plan to introduce a wave of young players who would allow them to stay at contender level after Stephen Curry ascends into heaven/fades into retirement; the other cornerstones of that gambit were James Wiseman and Moses Moody, which is why that plan died in the dirt. The Warriors have only succeeded in getting three years older, Wiseman has already been traded twice and has had health issues throughout his career, and Moody has slowly become a reliable 24-minutes-per-game guy, for what that may be worth. Curry, for his part, remains every bit the Stephen Curry he was when the succession plan was first devised.
But Kuminga, who has more games and minutes logged than either Moody or Wiseman, long ago became disenchanted with Steve Kerr's insistence that he fit himself into Kerr's system, and has been not very subtly agitating to be sent somewhere that he can be the best him he can be. That there is no "Kuminga" position in basketball has not undermined his vision, but he and his team have reached the point where the middle ground has become a snake-filled pit. He has played nine minutes in the team's last 17 games, and not at all in the last 13, and now he has been elevated to that loftiest of irritants, the subject of headlines proclaiming that he "will not be a distraction."
Indeed, this has been such an evergreen story that the other Warriors have largely moved on from the forest. They beat the Knicks at home last night and have won 10 of their last 14 games after a very AARP start, and would like that stretch of success to be the first thing you think of when the topic arises. But while his play has had nothing to do with theirs—while his play has, in fact, ceased to exist—Kuminga's disgruntlement has rather stolen the lights. Now that the NBA calendar says that teams can make trades, the anticipation that Kuminga would be emancipated, for whatever return an extremely unhappy young wing player might return, has far outstripped any of the following factors:
- The Warriors' minimal sense of urgency to make him happy.
- The potential trade partners and their minimal need for the things Kuminga can provide.
- The fading notion that unhappy players can and should be made happy as a function of their employment. See Ja Morant and the Memphis Grizzlies for further elucidation.
- The belief that the trade deadline is the NBA's Mardi Gras, second only to the NBA's Christmas, which is the start of free agency.
Kuminga is a scorer of some facility, true, but many of the other details of the modern game seem either to escape him or do not sufficiently interest him, and while Kerr was declared the best leader in sports by The Athletic, he is also stubborn about his style of play and who gets to play in it. Kuminga has been fairly stubborn about it as well, but only one of the aforementioned makes the rotation. More than that, there is a hierarchy on the roster that honors age and service to the firm as well as physical achievement; this is a team run by its most veteran veterans. Those players surely wish for Kuminga to get what he wants, but only insofar as it means relocation, not meaningful minutes with the ball in his hands.
So everyone agrees that this isn't sustainable, and eventually even the new contract Kuminga signed before this season will expire. But the Warriors do not share Kuminga's urgency for separation and seem increasingly unwilling to close that gap, to the point where Warriors sources have floated the notion to writers that they might not do anything at all, even if this season turns to next with Kuminga still sitting on the bench looking like he misses his phone. Maybe this makes them cruel landlords unwilling to shorten a lease, but that's not the actual crime here. The crime is that this is going to be a thing for months to come, at least among people who prefer player movement to players playing. Kuminga in stasis lacks sexiness on its face, but as a matter of longevity, or just as a low-stakes stalemate, it is only going to get more riveting, to the point where he could add two years of pension time while dressed like, well, a pensioner.
The Warriors, who have worked hard over the years to become a place that players want to play, have drawn their line in the drying concrete here, and we're just going to have to get used to that. So will Jonathan Kuminga, who is going to have to get used to seeing DNP-CD next to his name. Unless they make the kind of run they made last year to escape the play-in tier, the Kuminga story will only become more riveting as it becomes less relevant to the games themselves. That is itself revelatory, in that we bore easily. But Kuminga is one of those rare players who have become most interesting simply because they're not playing.
