In the Golden State Warriors’ two most important games of the season, forward Jonathan Kuminga was not in the rotation. Kuminga got a DNP-CD in the Warriors’ regular-season finale against the Los Angeles Clippers, and he got another one against their play-in victory against the Memphis Grizzlies on Tuesday.
Ahead of the Golden State’s first-round series against the Houston Rockets, which will tip off on Sunday, it’s unclear whether Steve Kerr’s coaching staff will find minutes for the 22-year-old. After the Grizzlies game, though, Draymond Green sounded extremely confident that Kuminga will have a role to play.
“He’ll contribute,” Green told reporters. “He’s great, he’s getting his work in. That’s all you can do in that situation is get your work in. And he’ll be meaningful for us in that series. I have zero doubt about that. I think the challenge for him is to stay mentally engaged, as it is for anyone in that situation, but I have zero doubt in my mind that he’s going to help us in this series. He will 1000%.”
On Dec. 5, Kuminga had one of his best games of the season against the Rockets. With Stephen Curry sidelined, Kuminga came off the bench to score a team-high 33 points on 13-for-22 shooting, in a 99-93 victory. It was also a career high at the time, but he topped it by scoring 34 points in back-to-back games later that month.
That wasn’t Kuminga’s only strong performance against Houston this season. On Nov. 2, in the Warriors’ sixth game, he scored six of Golden State’s eight points in overtime and finished with 23 points on 7-for-12 shooting in a 127-121 win. (Curry missed that game, too.)
In theory, Kuminga might be able to help mitigate the Rockets’ advantage in athleticism. At 6-foot-7, he’s five inches taller than Gary Payton II, and his size could be useful if Kerr wants to put switchable lineups on the court. Those two games against Houston, though, feel like they took place a million years ago. They were before Kuminga sprained his right ankle, an injury that kept him out of the lineup for more than two months. More importantly, they were before the Warriors acquired Jimmy Butler, who has changed the composition of the team.
Playoff Jimmy is going to play a ton of minutes. So is Green, who has been the league’s most dominant defender for the past couple of months. Unfortunately for Kuminga, he’s not a clean fit next to the two of them, primarily due to his lack of shooting gravity away from the ball.
It’s not just the shooting, though. Golden State has played combinations that compromise its spacing — Butler, Green and Payton; Butler, Payton and Kevon Looney — in the last couple of games, and did so in crunch time against the Clippers. For years, the Warriors have tried to overcome spacing issues with a combination of movement, screening and quick decisions. These two DNP-CDs signal that they are not confident in Kuminga’s decision-making.
In February, before Kuminga made his return, Kerr had a film session with him in which they watched some of his own tape and some of Butler’s. At the time, Kerr told reporters that Butler “just makes the simple play over and over again” and he wants Kuminga to learn from him.
“I think it’s always hardest for guys who are the most talented to make decisions ’cause they’ve got too many options at their disposal,” Kerr said.
Kerr has been transparent about why Kuminga hasn’t been playing heavy minutes since returning from the ankle injury. In an interview on 95.7 The Game last Thursday, Kerr said that Butler’s arrival “took away a lot of Jonathan’s minutes at the 4” and the team found “other lineups that have clicked” when Kuminga was hurt.
“The lineup with Jimmy, Jonathan and Draymond doesn’t fit real well, frankly,” he said during the radio interview. “It just doesn’t. We need more spacing.”
The next day, before Golden State’s game against the Portland Trail Blazers last Friday, Kerr elaborated. “It’s a tough combo,” he told reporters, but that doesn’t mean that he won’t try it again. On April 3 against the Los Angeles Lakers, the Warriors played Butler, Green and Kuminga together for the final five-plus minutes and came away with a 123-116 win. Kerr liked how Kuminga was playing that night, and it helped with their switching on defense.
“Things haven’t gone in JK’s direction, and that’s part of the NBA,” Kerr said. “And you never know, things change quickly, so everyone’s just gotta stay ready.”
After the Clippers game, Kerr told reporters that, during the team’s walkthrough, he’d told Kuminga that the team was not going with its usual rotation, but “I didn’t tell him he wasn’t going to play ’cause I wasn’t sure if he was going to play or not.” His explanation echoed what he’d said previously — “we’ve just found a group since Jimmy got here that we’re pretty comfortable with” — and he noted that forward Gui Santos had been taken out of the rotation, too.
Before the Grizzlies game, Kerr told reporters that he thought the team missed Santos against the Clippers. (Santos ended up playing six minutes against Memphis.) Asked if he’d talked to Kuminga about his role leading up to the game, he shook his head. And as to whether he’s concerned about losing a player mentally when he gives him a DNP-CD, he said no — not at this time of year, anyway.
“That’s regular-season stuff,” Kerr said. “When you go through the 82-game season, you factor in everything, you try to help everybody along, undersatnding where everyone is. When you get to the playoffs, everything goes out the window. You just try to win each game.”
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