One part of Jonathan Kuminga’s saga with the Warriors that hasn’t been discussed so much is his propensity for getting injured at the wrong time. Sure, there’s no good time to get injured, but for Kuminga, who’s never far from being yanked off the floor and not seeing it again for weeks, it’s unfortunate that he has to get hurt right when he is starting to find a groove.
It’s happened a handful of times, with the most recent example being early January of last season. Kuminga has just averaged 21 points per game in December. His last three games of the month were 34 points and 10 rebounds, 34 and 9, and 18 and 10. He was rolling. But a week later he sprained his ankle severely enough to leave the arena on crutches. He wound up missing the next two months. During that time the Warriors acquired Jimmy Butler. Kuminga was back to the bench.
Then at the start of this season, Kuminga was firing on all cylinders again. Steve Kerr even put him in the starting lineup and said he would keep him there for the foreseeable future. He was scoring in the ways Kerr prefers, as a cutter and downhill attacker, foregoing contested midrange jump shots, defending, rebounding. And then he got hurt. Missed two weeks with bilateral knee tendinitis.
Now he’s been glued to the bench for the past month. He’s finally, officially, demanded a trade, but his GM, Mike Dunleavy basically laughed that request into the ether when he said: “When you make a demand, there needs to be a demand … in the market,” effectively telling Kuminga and everyone who wonders why he hasn’t been dealt yet that nobody wants him.
That would include the Warriors, but now that Jimmy Butler is out for the season with a torn ACL the don’t really have a choice but to start playing Kuminga again. And just as he has done pretty much every time he’s endured these long stretches without playing a single minute, he has pried himself off the pine, jumped on the court, and immediately started scoring.
On Tuesday, Kuminga saw the court of an NBA game for the first time in 31 days and promptly put up 20 points on 7-of-10 shooting against Toronto. He rolled that momentum into Thursday, when he came out of the gate with 10 points on 3-of-3 shooting against Dallas.
So here it was happening again. Kuminga was starting to play well. Maybe up his trade value enough to get him the hell out of Golden State. And then he got hurt. It came late in the second quarter. Kuminga was driving to the rim and stepped on the foot of Brandon Williams and tweaking his ankle.
ESPN’s Anthony Slater later reported that Kuminga suffered an “ankle twist” and “minor knee hyperextension.” Steve Kerr confirmed after the game that it both a knee and ankle injury and that Kuminga will undergo an MRI on Friday.
“Such a shame,” Kerr said. “He was playing great.”
Indeed he was. In his two games back, Kuminga scored 30 points in 30 minutes on 10-of-13 shooting. Say what you want about this guy, but there is no way not to respect his mental toughness. To be put on the bench for the extended periods he has, and then just pop right back up and start putting up a point a minute is incredible stuff. What he did in the playoffs last year was extraordinary, going from out of the rotation to dropping 97 points over the final four games against the Wolves as legitimately the Warriors’ go-to scorer.
There aren’t many guys who can do that. It requires more than just physical ability. Staying engaged from the bench and being able to summon that kind of performance on the spot, with no warning, is a testament to a mature player. And he was doing it again.
Kuminga has been dragged through the mud. His coach pretty clearly despises him as a basketball player. His GM essentially threw him under the team bus and start backing over him. I am confident in saying there isn’t a single other team in the league that would be sitting Kuminga on the bench for weeks at a time, and he knows that. That’s why he wants a chance to go somewhere else.
But as long as he’s with the Warriors, he has, and has had, two choices: To pout and not be ready when his number actually is called, or stay mentally available and engaged and come out balling when it is. Kuminga, consistently, has gone the latter route. It’s so commendable. And it just stinks that so many times when he’s finally stumbled into some playing time and rhythm, an injury has shortly followed.
Hopefully this one won’t keep him out long, but the truth is, it might not have to. The trade deadline is in two weeks. This was maybe his last shot to make a strong enough impression for someone to offer something of significant enough value to get the Warriors to finally sign off on this inevitable divorce.
And that hurts the Warriors, too. Let’s not be naive about this. They want to trade him. Probably even Joe Lacob at this point. They just don’t want to look foolish in taking a bad deal only to watch him flourish somewhere else. Now that they’ve been forced into playing Kuminga, they need him to play well. And he was.
But nothing seems to be going right for the Warriors this season, either. Butler was having a great year and he goes down with a torn ACL. Al Horford was supposed to be a perfect offseason signing and he’s been more or less irrelevant. It’s an extension of the bum luck they suffered when Curry went down in the playoffs last season. There’s a good chance they were headed for the conference finals when that happened.
The only good thing that came out of it was it forced Kuminga onto the court, where he reminded everyone how talented he is. That was the one silver lining of the Butler injury, too. It got Kuminga on the court. But at least for now, he’s headed right back off of it.
