Can Kuminga help these Warriors?

Preview: Weary Warriors back home (finally) - core is clear to play

After an absolutely grueling schedule, the Golden State Warriors are finally back home, but the impacts of climbing this hill are starting to show. The Warriors sat all three of Steph Curry, Draymond Green, and Jimmy Butler (plus Horford) on the tail end of a back-to-back; combined with the ongoing absence of Jonathan Kuminga (more on that below), and Golden State played nine players all night.

So yes, the Warriors had some good wins on the road trip, but are sitting at 9-8 on the year. It’s too early to be overly concerned by the seeding, but 8th seed is not where this team wants to be when the post season starts. Tonight, they’ve got a chance to get back on track against the Portland Trail Blazers. A chance for revenge after dropping a surprise loss against them one day after the NBA gambling saga took down the Blazers old coach, Chauncey Billups. Tiago Splitter is still “interim” but the Blazers have been uneven, at best, overall. Notably,

It’s all above, but for those who are just skimming to get to the headline part of this, here’s tonight’s injury report. Apologies for the formatting, but this one is so long, it’s stretched across two pages in the NBA’s report.

And that’s the thing about this moment for Golden State: the injuries aren’t just names on a report, they’re context for a team that is still trying to figure out what it wants to be. Every absence shifts the rotation, alters the priorities, and adds a little more pressure on the guys who are available. Which brings us to the question hovering over everything right now.

It’s tough all over.

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GAME DETAILS

WHO: Golden State Warriors (9-8) vs. Portland Trail Blazers (6-9)

WHEN: Friday, November 21st, 2025; 7pm PST

WATCH: NBCSBA

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People and clouds: some blow away faster than you’d like

It’s been a weird season for Golden State. After roaring out of the gate over the first five games, they spent the next five backsliding. To be fair, this is about what was expected from the Warriors this season. As we approach 20 games into the season for this team, not much has fundamentally changed from that wobbly but impressive opening 10 game stretch. Far removed from the dominant eras of the past, Golden State’s hope is to stay relevant - meaning: avoid the play-in tournament.

To be fair to the team, this really has been a rough opening flurry to a long slog of a season.

But as this Kuminga injury stretches on further and further without any sort of meaningful updates from the team, the speculations are starting to grow. Anthony Slater, about as “insider” as any writer out there when it comes to the Warriors, dropped an extended breakdown of the situation. As always, he peppers a bunch of quotes throughout the article, including this eyebrow raiser from Butler, maybe Kuminga’s most trusted voice amongst all Warriors.

“I think everybody comes to that steppingstone moment in their career where you know that you can get over that hump,” Butler said. “Some people are like, ‘Nah, you’re not ready for that yet.’ But you know better. I think that’s where he is. I was at that point.”

The most important question for Kuminga and the Warriors is whether this is a mutually beneficial relationship or not.

That’s the uncomfortable truth the organization keeps circling. On paper, both sides need each other - Golden State needs his athletic punch, and Kuminga needs a platform big enough to justify his next contract. But emotionally, philosophically, even stylistically, the gap has widened. The franchise is still operating through a veteran-first prism, while Kuminga is fighting to prove he’s outgrown the training wheels. That misalignment is subtle, but it’s constant, and it shows up everywhere from shot selection to fourth-quarter trust.

Will Kuminga be back? Yeah. But whether he stays or not is a much more ambiguous question.

The off-season contracting stalemate was resolved with a short term deal that came with an oddly attached “we will tear this up at the end of the season” clause. A reader poked at something I wrote earlier this season, challenging my perception that Kuminga fell out of the rotation, and I promised to come back with more organized thoughts on this, so here goes. He didn’t fall out of the rotation, but it seems as if both he and the Warriors have lost the faith in one another.

First, Kuminga wants out of here. He chose the shorter contract “so he can maintain a higher level of control over his immediate future.” The Warriors never waffled on their demand that the team would control the contract option on the final year. It was, as my manager said, “a good negotiation. Nobody’s happy.” Read that quote from Butler above and stare into the sun for a moment. Kuminga wanted to leave over the off-season, and only reluctantly agreed to return (for as short as possible) once they ran out of wriggle room.

Secondly, the team isn’t sure that Kuminga helps this team on a nightly basis. The upside is there for sure. But the upside has never been a question. The problem in front of everyone now is how reliable better the team is with Kuminga. They are willing to believe it if they can, but looking at the numbers from Slater’s article (again): Kuminga was minus-36 in the 105 minutes that he shared the court with Green and Butler last season. There was a lot of work put in over the summer to develop some trust and new approaches, so the results this season have been noticeably better. In that hot opening five game stretch, the duo of Kuminga and Butler were plus-40 in 86 minutes… unfortunately that’s now descended to plus-7.2 in 186 minutes. It’s solid enough. Good, even.

But the tension here is that Kuminga is positioning himself as a primary option; and

when the Warriors were on a slide and needed to make a move, Kuminga was demoted back to the bench.

It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that the team’s slide coincided with Curry missing some time, and the reality is that this team just doesn’t know what to do with itself when Curry sits. This is a problem that has plagued the team for Kerr’s entire career. It’s not just playing with Curry, it’s being one of the helpful options - whether Curry is on court or not.

Kuminga’s results are not above the break so far. This is an oversimplified view of a player’s impact, but one that is objectively one of the truest measures of results. Check out the team’s net impact to points while on the court:

via Stat Muse

And this is where the two-way street comes into play. Kerr and the Warriors are not aggressively adjusting to whether or not Kuminga is on the court. There are considerations all over the place, and some new wrinkles this season are clearly an attempt to lean further into the Air Nation (with Curry) vs. Earth Nation (featuring Butler’s more measured approach) style of play coined by Eric Apricot.

“The second that Steph is in the game is completely different than when Steph is out and I’m in the game,” Butler said. “And if you’re still trying to run the Steph stuff, it’s not going to work. Nobody’s overreacting to anybody. I’m not saying ‘No, we should never do that.’ All I’m saying is Steph is the ultimate cheat code.

“So it is not fair to anybody to say that they can’t play with whatever lineup or whatever lineup. Because if the man is out there, anybody can play with him.”

There are two months left before the Warriors can trade Kuminga in mid-January, so odds are that, barring some huge meltdown, Kuminga and the Warriors will get another crack at this, but the problem with the Kuminga relationship is that Golden State’s best path towards improvement may well involve a Kuminga trade.

There’s mutual interest in making Kuminga look good - and it’s not like the Warriors franchise is rooting against one of their most important young players. Kuminga has been successful. He’s averaging the highest amount of minutes, rebounds, and assists of his career, and when the machine was buzzing? It’s just all too clear to the eyeballs that Kuminga adds a dimension that this team sorely needs.

So no, Kuminga doesn’t fall all the way out of the rotation just because of a few struggles. The team has continued to demonstrate their buy-in by playing him heavy minutes this season.

But this is where I’ve got to spend some extra space unpacking. What’s the crux here? Do the Warriors not trust Kuminga? Or is he just not a great fit here. His style of play looks different from the rest of the roster. I just pointed to that as a good thing in the preceding paragraph, but the other side of the picture shows all the messy yarn - the team is not as good with Kuminga on the court as they have been with him off it. And that’s a problem - especially for a guy already concerned about a team not leaning into him hard enough.

The injuries complicate all of this tremendously. In the games leading up to his removal from the starting lineup, Kuminga did not look good.

But 4-1 became 6-6. Kuminga’s knees began bothering him. His defensive juice and burst to the rim lessened. He went 1 of 9 shooting at home against the Pacers, missing all five of his 3s. Coaches dinged him for his perimeter shot selection as a reason for his minute reduction (season-low 20). Butler and Kuminga made sure to point to his eight rebounds as a sign of impact.

Curry’s illness forced him out of the lineup for three games. The offense slumped without him… Kuminga had five of the team’s 21 turnovers. Kerr and the veterans decided it was time to alter strategy. Kerr landed on a new starting lineup that included Moody and Will Richard,and Green said it’s harder to push back during a losing streak.

So now, the Warriors and Kuminga are at the same crossroad again. Does the team want him? Does he want the team? It’s all very complicated and hard.

The Warriors’ front office and coaching staff are aware of all this, and they understand the background against which all of this is cast. The Warriors are their core. Those top three players are going to define how high this team can climb, but all those little edge players are important too. Their impact defines how much of a lead bleeds away when Curry sits, or affects the effectiveness of those precious minutes that Curry is on court.

This is where the whole thing becomes such a paradox. The Warriors can clearly see the version of Kuminga that lifts their ceiling, and Kuminga can just as clearly see the version of the Warriors that limits his. Both truths exist at the same time, and both carry weight. That’s why every rotation tweak and every missed game feels larger than it should- it’s not just about one player, it’s about the identity crisis the franchise has been trying to outrun for two seasons.

Most brutally, all of this chatter and speculation is only rising now perhaps because of the exact injury that is keeping Kuminga out. This is how Steve Young took over for Joe Montana though, and there are some players like Gui Santos, Will Richard, and Quinten Post that are stepping into the breach right now. Different players, but the Warriors don’t really care right now; they just want to help the core as much as possible.

Both sides toed the line to get here, but are probably now looking in the mirror and wondering whether the fight was worth it or not. This feels the same. And not in a good way. Kuminga has bad blood built up against a team that he doesn’t believe is going to let him fly free. The Warriors have one eye on the trade market, both eyes on their old veteran core, and somehow, yet another set of eyes on the future. Freaky. Impossible. And that impossible absurdity is exactly what’s going wrong with this Kuminga relationship. Like the wave-particle duality, it’s not impossible for something to be two things at once, but it’s a mind-bender; and for Golden State, these two realities are still not aligned. This isn’t a Kuminga problem though, it’s a Kuminga and the Warriors problem.

Closing with Slater yet again, the same way he ended his, with the insightful words of Jimmy Butler:

“So he’s got a lot of feelings, which is OK,” Butler continued. “I think I just got to stay on him, though. Let him know that I am in your corner. We all are in your corner. Just breathe. Breathe. We’re not out to get you. I don’t think anybody’s out to get you. Fans or media, maybe. But the people in it, we are not out to get you, bro. I promise you. I promise.”

We aren’t out to get you here at DNHQ, Kuminga. We just want to understand.

PREDICTION

Home cooking delivers another win. With everyone healthy, and the road trip over, the Warriors can get back on track. A solid win tonight, and then a softer schedule that will allow some time to practice and magically heal Kuminga’s knees.

Music Friday

Guys, gals, and non-binaries, I have to end this quick. Going to see one of my favorite little bands tonight. Going to close my computer now and head up to The Bottom of the Hill. This band is so fun! I’m tired, but excited.

Here’s one about Minecraft. Don’t judge, it’s punk music, they can sing about whatever.

“I can do anything you want me to.”