Honorary Warrior For Life? Vote on Jonathan Kuminga

our way of paying tribute

The index article for Honorary Warriors For Life lists everyone already polled.

Introducing Honorary Warriors For Life

The concept is simple. You get to vote on the question “Is X an Honorary Warrior For Life?”

What does that phrase mean? I once tried to define it, and people found it more fun to bring in their own definitions, so I am now back to keeping it vague, like “Most Valuable Player” or “Greatest Of All Time” or “sandwich”.

“Is X an Honorary Warrior For Life?”

I now only poll players who have played more than 1 year with GSW. This isn’t a rule I wanted, but the people have spoken and I made the unwritten rule a formal rule. The link at the top links to an index for all previous player votes.

And now for our nominee…

Jonathan Kuminga

The present

This Anthony Slater article is a nice sign-off to the Kuminga era. I think it will leave everyone feeling confirmed in their (different) theories about the Kuminga saga.

It adds interesting details:

• Other coaches wanted to draft Wagner while Lacob and Atkinson wanted Kuminga.

• Lacob didn’t exactly veto the Caruso-Kuminga trade but Lacob’s attachment to Kuminga cast a dark shadow over all team moves.

• JK refused to play in a number of games this season because he didn’t want to look bad.

If you watch my past videos, Kerr *did* run a lot of plays for Kuminga on offense. JK just wasn’t very good at them.

The past

I was totally against the Kuminga pick at the time. (I left him completely off my 17 player public ballot,)

But to be fair, the majority of draft analysts argue teams should pick the high risk high reward pick in the lottery since you basically need a star to win it all and the draft is the best way to get them.

Subhamoy

Jul 29, 2021

I understand the problems with Kuminga. But if someone is considered no 5 in a 5 man draft for a year, passing on him when he falls to 7 on draft night is unwise. (I hope I am right)

It’s funny looking back at the live draft thread how everything seems like foreshadowing.

Eric Apricot

Jul 29, 2021

I like how Kuminga says GSW is the perfect team for him because… he could have gotten a lot more playing time with another team, so I appreciate the positivity

At DNHQ, we voted 67% in favor of drafting Kuminga vs the whole tournament field. But the DNHQ live draft thread itself was generally much more negative about the Kuminga pick.

Eric Apricot

Jul 29, 2021

If GSW takes him, I’m gonna embrace him. After a moment of staring.

DNHQ had wanted Moody and Sengun, so we were pretty excited when Moody fell to #14.

Eric Apricot

Jul 29, 2021

WOW DUBS GOT MOODY AT #7 AND KUMINGA FELL TO THEM AT #14!!

So, people might crap on Lacob / Myers now, but picking Kuminga was widely considered the correct move at the time, and was a plausible drafting strategy.

And Two Timelines was a dud with hindsight, but if Steph declined hard after 2020 and Kuminga and Wiseman had been even a median outcome of expectations, then Two Timelines wouldn’t look so bad. When you try a high-risk, high-reward move, you often lose out.

The future

Will JK be a star? He’s so young and talented that it’s still possible. There are fewer and fewer excuses left for him. Still… I just can’t shake the feeling that if JK had approached his GSW time like Gui Santos did, how it could have all been different. Do what the coaches want at maximum effort. Don’t think any task is beneath you.

We know that JK generally refused to focus on the things the coaches wanted from him. If JK had become a big effort guy on defense and transition, then maybe he could have taken the Kawhi Leonard path to stardom with the Warriors.

But in the end, who am I to personally second-guess him? Kuminga earned tens of millions of dollars playing basketball, which is a lot more success than I or most of us will ever have. If he’d landed in a different place, like say Jalen Green did, he would have made even more money. So JK’s approach was very successful to maximize JK’s short term income.

But that’s not the kind of thing I need to root for as a *Warriors* fan. Go in peace, JK.

Final video creator note

It was very interesting to analyze Jonathan Kuminga’s play, but I mostly avoided doing it for Explain One Play videos. Part of the reason was that for the JK videos I did do, I found total views would go up, but the YouTube comments quality would consistently go down. (Yes, YT comments usually are dreck, but E1P YT commenters are pretty high quality.)

The other part was that JK’s play had so much variance that if I picked 1 or 2 plays to analyze, it would either show him looking like a superstar or muffing up something basic. This would feed some annoying subset of the viewers. A big audience was starving for videos on Kuminga and how he was stupid, and another big audience was starving for videos about how Kerr is stupid. There are still a LOT of easy clicks to be had this way.

One film study I did which I never published was on Kuminga’s play in the 2023 SAC series which got him benched for the LAL series. There was a LOT of anger from Kuminga stans on how Kerr messed up by not playing JK and how he would have been the difference. When I watched all of JK’s minutes v SAC, I saw he was outplayed on both ends by Alex Len(!) who out-rebounded and out-hustled JK. LAL had similar personnel to exploit JK with size.

But I ended up never making a video. It just feels depressing to feed or exploit a really crummy discourse. Something about the topic of Kuminga attracts an extra slice of audience that had the worst takes: simplistic, angry, irrational, and boring. Takes everyone just have to share at top volume as if they had been the first to ever think of it.

Farewell

I can’t prove this, but it feels like a lot of people were processing deep unresolved emotions about either

• having a crappy boss who didn’t appreciate your talent and good ideas, and asked you to do dumb things, had outdated ideas, called you out in public, and held you back in your career; or

• having a selfish co-worker who got paid more than most workers, refused to help others, fixated on their own harmful ways of doing this, refused to change, was super sensitive and couldn’t take criticism, and only cared about getting credit and more money.

Now neither one of those descriptions is necessarily about Kerr or Kuminga, but depending on your personal perspective… they might be.

So, farewell Jonathan and a farewell to the endless drama surrounding him and endless yelling about him.

Your Vote

You can vote by poll and/or by comment (which counts as ten poll votes) with an explanation and a single #YES or #NO. A straight 75% vote will qualify the player for HWFL status.

I know you may feel creative and want to do other funny hashtags, but this will only cause me more work and annoyance, so please redirect your creativity.

Bonus Poll

Dub Nation, imagine you see Jonathan Kuminga in a game with no practical implications for the Warriors. (So not against GSW, ignore draft picks, playoff seeding, etc.) Do you want them to do well or poorly?