The good times of the Golden State Warriors’ 4-1 start have gone up in smoke. They’re 5-7 over their last 12 games with a bottom-10 offense, which should be impossible for a team with Stephen Curry. After the Oklahoma City Thunder blew their doors off on Nov. 11, Draymond Green and Jimmy Butler pulled a page from the classic “let’s send a message through the media” playbook.
“[At the start of the season], I think everybody was committed to winning and doing it any way possible. And right now it does not feel that way,” Green said.
He then added this little jab: “I think everyone has a personal agenda in this league. But you have to make the personal agenda work in the team confines. If it doesn’t work, you kinda got to get rid of your agenda. Or eventually the agenda is the cause of someone getting moved.”
Green insisted later on social media that he wasn’t talking about anyone in particular with the agenda shot, and perhaps he wasn’t. But perception is reality here. For a guy who loves to paint himself as the smartest one in the room, Green should have known how this was going to come off. Certainly he wasn’t talking about Curry or Butler. At best, he was pointing the finger at Golden State’s younger players. At worst, it was about Kuminga specifically.
It would appear that Kuminga took it as the latter, feeling “like the scapegoat again,” ESPN reported on Thursday, a day after the Warriors lost in Miami.
And why wouldn’t he? This guy has basically been painted as the turd in Golden State’s punch bowl for the last two years — the out-of-tune soloist who can’t help but screw up all the kumbaya chemistry. It’s a brutal brush with which to be painted. Kuminga isn’t a perfect player, certainly not in this particular system, but he was clearly doing everything in his power to play the “right way” in the early part of the season.
He was, by any measure, a model of efficiency. He took the right shots. Made the right passes. Defended. Rebounded. Even Steve Kerr gave in, handing Kuminga a starting, and more importantly, closing spot. That was perhaps always going to be short lived. Kuminga wasn’t going to play perfectly forever and his leash with Kerr has never been much more than a choke collar. His turnovers went up. His rebounds went down. Kerr put him back on the bench, inserting rookie Will Richard and Moses Moody into the first five. Then he got hurt. He’s missed the last four games. And here we are.
As soon as the Warriors won a couple games in Kuminga’s absence, the whispers started. See! They really are better without him! Bogus. What happened was Stephen Curry scored 95 points over two wins against the Spurs. If we’re being honest, the Warriors haven’t established any consistent means of beating the good teams in the league, let alone the elite ones, other than Curry throwing on his cape.
That’s not an agenda thing. That’s an ability thing. Outside of Curry, the Warriors are a team full of flawed players and right now those flaws, on micro and macro levels, are being exposed. Nobody else can create consistent individual offense, Butler included, making them basically entirely dependent on Curry’s gravity. Butler, who largely scores as a beneficiary of Curry’s movement just like everyone else, was supposed to help in this regard way more than he has.
Collectively the Warriors are painfully small and, as such, they’re one of the worst rebounding teams in the league. Generally speaking, they cannot stay in front of penetrators and they don’t have a rim protector to clean things up on the back end. The only reason the defense currently ranks 10th is because a couple of doormat opponents have propped up the rating.
Al Horford is officially old. Gary Payton II can’t shoot. Buddy Hield can’t do anything but shoot. Brandin Podziemski and Moody can only sometimes shoot. Draymond is shooting 38% from the field. Only four teams in the league turn the ball over as often or more. All of which is to say, the Warriors have a bunch of problems right now. Kuminga isn’t, or shouldn’t be, the scapegoat.
But he’s also not the solution.
After all, there’s a reason why his fit with this team, and specifically within this system, has been discussed ad nauseam: because it’s not good. Green and Butler need shooters around them because neither of them can shoot (even though Green has been respectable from 3 and Butler is shooting a low-volume 45%), and Kuminga is anything but a reliable shooter. The thing he does best, attack downhill, the Warriors don’t want him to do except for in very specific situations. It’s too fine a line to walk. He’s going to veer off and when he does, he gets yanked and/or blamed by way of thinly veiled digs about agendas, as if these intangible factors are the reason Golden State is a .500 team.
They’re not. This is a full-roster issue. No one player deserves blame. It is what it is. Everyone wants these young guys to be better than they actually are, in part because they look pretty damn good at times and it gets everyone’s hopes up. But none of it is consistent. That’s the difference between role players and All-Stars. You can’t turn the former into the latter by pulling the right rotations out of a hat. Richard has been brilliant as a rookie. Kerr started him against Portland and then only played him nine minutes. Every night becomes a guessing game of who’s going to get the time. One game Payton II can’t get 10 minutes. The next he’s in the closing lineup.
None of this is a knock on Kerr, by the way. He wants these guys to play in a way that forces him to hand over a solidified spot. But none of them do it consistently. So he try tries to mix and match the strengths of a flawed group. Podziemski’s energy and paint gravity. Payton’s defense and offensive connectivity. Moody and Hield when they’re hot. Kuminga when he’s flowing. Getting all these things to line up is like trying to time the stock market, and right now the Warriors are barely breaking even thanks to a few Curry flurries.
That’s not sustainable. Something has to change, and chances are it’s going to be Kuminga. At this point, it’s just better for everyone to trade him. End the charade. Let the guy have a chance with a team that will allow him to grow through his mistakes and bring back a player who can help a Warriors team that is, for all its flaws, still as good as anyone not named the Thunder on the right night.
To that end, Kuminga — in part because he has, in fact, played so well for the most part — is expected to be a hot commodity on the market as the trade deadline approaches, according to Mark Stein, citing one league executive who tabbed Kuminga as “one of the best trade chips in the league.”
So fire up the hypotheticals, because at this point, who wants to do this dance anymore? That contract, it appears now more than ever, was always an arranged marriage headed for divorce. Will whatever comes back in a potential Kuminga deal put the Warriors in position to truly contend for a championship? Maybe. Chances are, even as constructed, they will catch their breath after this rough travel schedule to start the season and go on a run. Ultimately, they were always going to be a team built to win 16 playoff games rather than X number of regular-season games. They want to avoid the play-in tournament, but they don’t care about seeding. If you have Curry on offense and Green on defense, you have a chance.
But enough with the Kuminga experiment. As long as he’s with the team, even if these comments aren’t actually aimed at him, the Warriors should be going out of their way to not even give the appearance that they’re talking in Kuminga code. After they got blasted by OKC, the talk should have been about Curry playing poorly. Green has had some stinkers this year. Butler is still way too passive in way too many situations begging for him to take control.
So say that. Put the blame on the max-contract guys with established careers and reputations. It’s not to suggest all this chemistry and role-acceptance from the young guys stuff doesn’t matter, but at the end of the day it’s about playing basketball. And the Warriors, from top to bottom, haven’t done that well enough to start the season.
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