Nobody has ever doubted the talent of Jonathan Kuminga. Whether he possesses any single skill elite enough to carve out a starting role in the NBA has been, and still is, up for debate. But the man can score, and so far the Hawks are seeing the best of what he has to offer.
Through three games with his new team, Kuminga is averaging better than 21 points on 68/56 shooting splits. He put up a hyper-efficient 27 and 7 in his debut. Backed that up with 17 and 9 his next time out. Backed that up with 20 and 7 on Sunday. The Hawks won all three games. Two of them were against the Wizards, but still. They are plus-59 across his 80 minutes so far.
So giddy are Hawks fans with what they’ve seen from Kuminga that they’re chanting, “Thank you, Warriors!” in the stands, as if they’ve been handed an actual savior.
Hawks color commentator Dominque Wilkins, who you would have to imagine sees a lot of himself in the high-flying, hard-dunking Kuminga, echoed the appreciative sentiment after Kuminga took a pass on the block and proceeded to throw down a two-foot, left-handed hammer that had Portland’s 7-foot rookie Yang Hensen ducking for cover.
If you didn’t listen to the end of the clip, Wilkins concluded with this summary of Kuminga’s stellar play to begin his Atlanta career: “I’m not surprised. We’ve seen Kuminga do this before in Golden State. How you give up on a guy that young, with that ability, is beyond me.”
There is a contingent of Warriors fans, perhaps a large one depending on which feeds you follow, that would agree with Wilkins. Kuminga was never given a fair shot, they’ll tell you. His minutes weren’t consistent. He’d spend weeks in Kerr’s doghouse for mistakes all young players make. They wouldn’t play him until they were forced to. They wouldn’t trade him until they were forced to. He was the human toll of a two-timeline disaster.
These are the people who will remind you about 2023-24, Kuminga’s third year in the league, when he put up over 16 PPG on 53% shooting. That season, only five forwards with a usage rate above 20% generated more than Kuminga’s 120.1 points per 100 possessions, per Cleaning the Glass: Giannis Antetokounmpo, LeBron James, Jimmy Butler, Lauri Markannen and Pascal Siakam.
Probably the height of the “how is this guy not in an NBA rotation?” outcry came in the second round of last year’s playoffs, when Kuminga popped off the bench, where he’d been collecting dust having taken DNPs in four of the seven games against Houston, and turned into Golden State’s go-to scorer after Steph Curry got hurt against Minnesota.
It’s a fair point. On its face, a guy who can jog onto the court cold and average 20 in a second-round playoff series not having a solidified spot on merit seems ludicrous. Perhaps it was. Maybe the Warriors didn’t know what they had, or refused to even find out, and in the end their trash will turn out to be Atlanta’s treasure.
Or maybe this start in Atlanta is just another one of Kuminga’s hot stretches that never last.
There is, indeed, a whole other contingent of Warriors fans who will be happy to tell you this side of the story. The one where Kuminga plays out of his mind for a stretch but eventually always falls back into old, inefficient habits.
Last year, for instance, Kuminga averaged better than 20 PPG on 48/41 shooting splits over a stretch of 15 midseason games. In a 32-game sample on both sides of that stretch, though, he averaged 12.9 PPG on 43/24 splits.
This season, after a dramatic offseason in which both the Warriors and Kuminga wanted a trade but settled on a two-year, $48 million contract that was designed to move, he looked like the player Kerr always dreamed of. He was defending. Rebounding. Running the floor. Swapping out his beloved one-on-one midrange jumpers for in-rhythm 3s, straight-line drives and smart cuts that took advantage of Curry’s gravity.
Over nine glorious games, he averaged 17.1 points and, importantly, seven rebounds on scorching 51/41/82 shooting splits. Had that continued, Kuminga might still be with the Warriors. But it didn’t. Over his next nine games, he averaged 6.1 points on 31/19/50 shooting splits.
There’s context to consider with all this. More than once, an injury interrupted a good stretch for Kuminga and he would have to rediscover his rhythm weeks later. By then, his role was different. Even when he was healthy, Kerr messed with his minutes on a near nightly basis. You can argue that was Kerr being inconsistent with his commitment or that it was Kuminga being inconsistent with his play.
Either way, the good times, and shots, always eventually turned bad. Right now, Atlanta is getting the good, but that can change quickly. Take this shot, for example:
Kerr didn’t want Kuminga taking that shot at all. Sure he had a height advantage on Scoot Henderson and the middle of the floor was open, and yes he can make that shot. When it’s going in, it looks great. But the point is that over time, it doesn’t go in nearly enough (or at least it hasn’t to this point in his career).
Consider that from the start of last season to today, among players who have taken at least 100 shots between 10 and 25 feet, only two guys in the entire league have fared worse than Kuminga’s 29.6%. It’s the difference between a good shooter and someone who sometimes shoots good. Kuminga is the latter.
Again, a different context could end up telling a different tale. Maybe with more leeway in Atlanta (if Quin Snyder indeed gives him that), Kuminga will play more freely, without looking over his shoulder in fear of getting yanked for every mistake or bad shot, and that will lead to the sort of development that Kuminga supporters say he was never given a chance to achieve with the Warriors.
That’s the upside for the Hawks, who are not committed to Kuminga beyond this season. That’s what made his contract so trade-friendly. The second year is a team option. If the Hawks don’t particularly like what they see over these next five weeks and potentially in the playoffs, they can cut ties and the only thing they would have lost was Kristaps Porzingis, whom they almost certainly weren’t going to re-sign anyway considering his health troubles.
So it’s essentially a free tryout for an irrefutably talented, super athletic young player who believes he can be a star if given a fair chance. When it’s going good, as it has for this short stint to start his Atlanta career, it looks like Kuminga is right. But a lot of Warriors fans would say they’ve seen this movie before, and it doesn’t ever end the way you want to believe it can.
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