Basketball is not a sport, it's a way of life.
The complicated case of Jonathan Kuminga
Over the last few years, the term “stock” has become an all-too-commonly used word in the parlance of basketball dialogue when talking about the state of a player’s development. If it’s not apparent, it’s a way for talking heads or typing fingers to intone that they remain invested in the potential of a player. Its ubiquity has rendered it a bit trite and flattened its purpose, but I myself am quite guilty of using it with figurative frivolity, so I’m not one to talk. While I stand by my track record where evaluating the potential of players is concerned, my history with actual investing is not quite as successful as that of the athletic kind, though, full transparency, I have the same bad habit in both arenas of holding my position for too long. I think the optimist in me always believes that if I stand strong long enough, the tide will turn. Right, Disney? Right?!?!?!
Why all this stock drivel from a newsletter that you come to for basketball drivel? Well, it was my ham-fisted setup for a conversation about the difficult position that the Warriors are in with one of their most tumultuous investments—fourth-year forward Jonathan Kuminga.
To be clear, I am not implying that Kuminga himself is a source of tumult; in fact, by all accounts, he’s a good kid (he’s a man, but by league standards, he is still in his infancy) and a hard worker. Though we have seen the occasional flare up of drama over the last 365. But the ups and downs of the Jonathan Kuminga experience in Golden State have created an environment in which the Warriors brass clearly still doesn’t know how to evaluate him as an asset. If they did, the former seventh overall pick in the ’21 draft wouldn’t have watched nearly all the notable players from his draft class sign extensions—including teammate Moses Moody, who signed a three-year, $39 million extension at the deadline for negotiations—while Kuminga will now get to restricted free agency in the summer.
That decision by itself lets you know how uncertain Golden State feels about Kuminga’s future. While teams like the Cavs, Magic, and Raptors rushed to re-sign their budding stars from the same class, shelling out more money than was necessary in several cases for the sake of showing good faith, the Warriors and Kuminga found themselves at an impasse that is indicative of a general standoff between player and franchise regarding what each thinks the other is worth.
During their contract negotiations this summer, the Warriors said many of the right things in the media regarding still seeing superstar potential in Kuminga. The same potential Kuminga clearly sees in himself, as he believed he was entitled to somewhere near the superstar money that many of his peers were receiving. Golden State, who were said to be offering around $30 million a year, apparently did not agree.
Of course, like a good Zelda map, there are levels to this shit, as Warriors General Manager Mike Dunleavy Jr. may be eyeing moving Kuminga if the right offer becomes available—cough Giannis. But if the Warriors don’t move JK, the decision to abate a decision on Kuminga isn’t without consequences. Were he to have a big year, or to find himself being courted by another franchise, the asking price for Kuminga may go up significantly from what Golden State potentially could have had him for this offseason. That’s to say nothing of the relationship cost for an organization and player that have found themselves at odds during different intervals of their relationship.
The friction centers around Kuminga feeling marginalized by a coach who in many ways does marginalize the player’s best skills, but to the benefit of the system. Kuminga, who functions most comfortably with time and space to operate, has always been a difficult stylistic fit in Steve Kerr’s offense. The crux of the issue centers around Kuminga’s inability and unwillingness to take and make perimeter shots at a high enough level to keep defenses honest and maintain the fidelity of the Warriors’ offensive spacing. While this is supposed to have been an area of focus for Kuminga over the last two summers, the improvement just isn’t there.
In his sophomore campaign, Kuminga took 28.4% of his total field goal opportunities in catch-and-shoot situations. Since then, only 17.6% of his total shots have been of the catch-and-shoot variety. Instead, he has taken more pullups, to the tune of just 36.5% accuracy, and functioned more around the rim, where as a cutter he’s electric, and as a post operator he is fine. But the Warriors don’t need a 6’8” undersized power forward, they need an athletic wing who can stress defenses in ways that Kuminga still doesn’t offensively.
Kuminga is an electric athlete, probably in the top 3% of the league where athleticism is concerned—which, by my calculations, puts him in about the top 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of athletes in the world. And it’s that very athleticism that is at the center of what makes Kuminga such an exciting player. In terms of fast-twitch muscles, Kuminga runs, jumps, and moves at an elite level and does so on a big, strong frame that simply looks better than most 6'8", 210-lb wings. When Kuminga flexes this athleticism—whether finishing around the rim, getting out in transition, or when he locks in defensively and just eliminates a player—you understand why there remains so much optimism about the type of player he is capable of becoming.
If Kuminga can develop enough complementary skills to accentuate his elite physical gifts, then the ceiling is as high as any young player in his draft class. Yet, it’s also that very conditional nature of Kuminga—if this, then…—that has led to the uncertainty about who he can become. For example, many believe that if he can shoot, then he might be a star. (I also believe that if Disney would cut back on overpriced, eight-episode one-offs on Disney+, then I wouldn’t be so damn worried about the outcome of Moana 2.)
Of course, that’s the rub with Kuminga—the shooting. Particularly the lack of three-point shooting. Kuminga shoots just 33.6% from distance for his career and has been backsliding after hitting an encouraging 37.0% his sophomore season. Last year, the Warriors forward shot just 32.1% on only 2.2 attempts per game from long range. He’s also seen the percentage of his total points from the three-point line drop from 24.3% in ’23 to just 10.5% so far this season and his three-point attempt rate drop from 32.4% his rookie season to 19.1% last year—though at 26.5% it has recovered some this season.
More worrisome, last season he made just 34.2% of his threes when left wide open, which the NBA defines as being given six feet of distance or more by the nearest defender—league average is 36.6%. In the modern NBA, this would be problematic no matter what, but on a Warriors team that relies so heavily on spacing and already has to contend with defenses sagging off Draymond, it becomes an outsized issue. This is why Kerr opted to bring Kuminga off the bench in their last two games against New Orleans, as with Andrew Wiggins and Steph Curry out, Kerr needed to insert Buddy Hield and Lindy Waters III for their shooting. (For Kuminga’s part, he never profiled as a shooter coming into the league, and the Warriors’ offense will not be predicated on how he can fit around Steph and Draymond for a whole lot longer. Still, he presents quite an issue in the here and now of it all.)
One of the other glaring problems for Kuminga, which is inextricably linked to the shooting, remains the matter of processing. There is a latency in nearly every decision Kuminga makes. Whether it’s reflective of a lack of confidence or a matter of processing power, it’s a problem that is really conspicuous when you watch Kuminga function in the half-court. In a pass-heavy, read-and-react offense like Golden State’s, that lost split second is enough to allow defenses to recover and close the sliver of opportunity that briefly existed. Perhaps Kuminga would function better in an offense that was more heavily predicated on sets, leaving his bandwidth to attend to the matter of running the play versus reading the defense. But in truth, if Kuminga can’t find a way to speed up his attack, he’ll always be leaving a bit on the table as he marginalizes his own explosive athleticism by not taking advantage of the window when a player has to recover and react to him.
Kuminga also just doesn’t provide much else offensively if he’s not scoring. The baseline and backdoor cuts are nice ways of maneuvering in space, but they aren’t exactly the type of actions that define a player’s greatness. Meanwhile, Kuminga is just a ho-hum passer—he’s averaged 1.7 assists per game for his career, and while his usage percentage last season (23.7%) was good for 34th in the league, his assist percentage (12.3%) was just 110th. Even his 1.2 offensive boards a game last season were good for just sixth on his own team, a really disappointing mark considering the athleticism.
Defensively, Kuminga has the goods when he decides to compete and stay within defensive principles. However, there are far too many times where he bails out a play by falling for a pump fake or reaching in.
As you can see here, he’s way too upright and then just lazily reaching across as Grant makes his move:
Again, he bites on a lame pump from Ingram—who he did guard well in the second matchup—and commits a silly foul.
With his size and mobility, he presents as a versatile defender who just needs to be more consistent intellectually and effort-wise on that end. Though again, the rebounding numbers are not what they should be considering the athletic ability, as Kuminga pulls down just 3.9 boards per game for his career—the same number former teammate Chris Paul averaged last season with the Warriors. In truth, if Golden State knew that Kuminga could be relied upon to be an elite-level defender with regularity—and yes, he has that type of potential in him—they may have already invested, but until he can give you 25 minutes of sound, consistent defense every night, it’s just difficult to have that level of belief in him as a high-value asset.
All of this was not set up to argue against Kuminga, who is coming off his best two games of the season against the Pelicans. (Games in which Kerr clearly ran more offensive looks with the intention of getting Kuminga the ball in his hands to operate in the spaces he’s most comfortable in.) He’s barely 22 years old, and after making his discontent with his role known last season, he responded in a way that many of us didn’t expect, averaging 17.8 points per game on 54.6% shooting from the field once he became a full-time starter. For the season, Kuminga averaged 16.1 points on 52.9% from the floor, becoming just the 21st player in league history to average 16 or more points on 52.5% or better from the field at the age of 21 or younger—joining a group that, aside from a Deandre Ayton here or a John Collins there, is filled with some of the league’s all-time greats, or those presumed to get there. The way Kuminga played last year once given more opportunity is the type of response you want from an investment after struggling through the Q1 of the season. Unfortunately, rather than last season feeling like a steppingstone, the concerns outlined here have been just as apparent early into this year. Now, “early” needs to be acknowledged, but it’s just tough to watch a lot of the same frustrations repeating themselves as glaringly as they have thus far. With Kuminga, the highs are very high, but the lows are still really low.
And that’s what this all comes back to—Jonathan Kuminga remains a high risk, high reward asset. But after a mercurial first three seasons and a somewhat underwhelming start to his fourth, the Golden State Warriors are finally going to have to decide how valuable of an asset he is to them.