Throughout most of their recent past, the Warriors have been too good to have to reckon with their future: wonkish asset-compiling and draft-pick flipping are the domain of franchises that don’t have Stephen Curry. Even after Kevin Durant decamped to Brooklyn and Klay Thompson bailed for Dallas, Curry and Draymond Green could transform just about any scruffy lineup into a good team. In turn, the Warriors’ seemingly guaranteed greatness enabled a kind of grandiose, magical thinking. The front office embraced a two-timeline approach because when you win so much now, it’s easy to convince yourself that you can win forever; Steve Kerr’s offensive system was free to prioritize aesthetics as much as results.
Now, though, after missing the playoffs with a fully healthy team for the first time, the Curry-Green era is all but over. The Warriors know it—over the last year, they’ve sought the kind of big name reinforcements they once spurned, trying and failing to land LeBron James, Paul George and Lauri Markannen. Suddenly, the Warriors’ “young core” will have to become their core. And as the sun sets on the Warriors’ empire, the end of Curry’s career will be determined by how quickly Jonathan Kuminga can launch into the prime of his own.
In his third season, the 21-year-old Kuminga finally cemented himself as an important, if irregular, part of the Warriors rotation. Ever since the Warriors drafted him with the seventh pick in 2021, Kuminga has been among their most offensively productive players on a minute-by-minute basis. Last year, he proved that he could be one of their most productive players on a game-by-game one too, averaging 16.1 points and 4.8 rebounds in just 26.3 minutes. To wit, his 29.5 points per 100 possessions ranked second on the team and his 138 dunks were the most in franchise history..
While Kuminga is probably the team’s most important long-term piece, he represents a repudiation of the ideas that have made the Warriors so successful. Whereas the Warriors’ dynasty was fueled by their mastery over the nuances and finesses of basketball, Kuminga is a rather straight-forward player. He’s a good scorer, not because of his supreme skill, but because he’s big and strong and can jump high. For better or worse, he’s the rare Warrior whose body moves faster than his mind.
As such, there’s a slight tension between Kuminga and the Warriors: he’s the most conventional player on a team that prides itself on bucking convention. Despite his impressive statistics, he struggled to earn the trust of Steve Kerr, who seems to begrudge Kuminga every minute that he lets him play. In the winter, Kuminga demanded a trade and the Warriors entertained trade offers for him over the summer.
As the rookie-contract extension deadline looms, there’s perhaps an insurmountably large delta between the contract that Kuminga feels he deserves and the one that the Warriors are comfortable giving him. In Kuminga’s mind, he’s the bridge between two eras of Warriors teams; in Kerr’s mind, Kuminga is too unreliable to demand a big role in the present.
And the thing is, they’re both right. Kuminga, along with fellow Zoomers Brandin Podziemski and Trayce Jackson-Davis, is one of the few sources of potential on the Warriors. If everything goes according to plan, his ascent will counteract Curry’s and Green’s declines. At his best, Kuminga can be the kind of muscular, high-speed wing scorer that populates All-Star teams and signature shoe campaigns. Catch him in the right slant of light and he looks like a geared-up version of a young Jaylen Brown, powerfully striding by defenders on his way to the paint.
And yet, Kuminga isn’t even guaranteed a starting spot this year, let alone a starring role in years to come. Outside of his flashy scoring, his game is fairly unevolved, lacking a certain degree of polish and understanding.For Kuminga, every possession can become a haunted house, each development waiting to ambush him. Not yet able to multitask with the ball in his hands, he’s less a pure scorer than he is purely a scorer. On defense, every rotation is a fire drill—his athleticism allows him to be an above-average defender, but his unawareness prevents him from being a great one. Last January, Kerr controversially benched Kuminga, citing a dereliction of the “little things” that the Warriors’ intricate scheme needs to stay afloat.
By the end of the month, though, Kuminga was permanently reinserted back into the starting line-up. No matter how much Kerr may resent it, the Warriors need Kuminga. They no longer have the privilege of snootery because the 2024 version of Curry isn’t nearly as good as the 2022 version, let alone the 2016 one.
In this sense, the Warriors are torn between the romantic and the pragmatic. They owe Curry and Green one last chance to contend, but they also have a responsibility to maintain hope for a post-Curry future. Kuminga is their best chance to reconcile the two: his development will determine whether these final Curry seasons are a dying of the light or a passing of the torch.
