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As much as the Golden State Warriors want to remain drama-free next season, they have a big elephant in the room with Jonathan Kuminga’s contract.
With that, the former NBA veteran Kendrick Perkins is convinced that the Warriors aren’t going to get what they need out of Kuminga, considering the circumstances.
“It’s going to affect the locker room that’s trying to win or have intentions on winning the championship,” Perkins said, regarding the Warriors’ stalemate with Kuminga.
“I don’t know if Jonathan Kuminga is watching NBA Today, but they don’t want you, dog. They don’t value you, because if they did, you wouldn’t be going through this. It started last season. Steve Kerr showed you how he felt about you when you were out of the rotation during the Play-In Tournament, in the first round against the Rockets. I understand Mike Dunleavy is now running things in the front office … but Jonathan Kuminga wasn’t a Mike Dunleavy pick; that was a Bob Myers pick.”
In 2021, Kuminga landed on the Warriors as the seventh-overall pick. He was a product of the NBA G League Ignite experiment, skipping the NCAA after attending high school in New Jersey.
Kuminga fired up a 70-game run for the Warriors as a rookie in 2021-2022. He even played in 16 playoff games, averaging 5.2 points in 8.6 minutes during the Warriors’ championship run.
For the past four seasons, Kuminga appeared in 258 games for the Warriors, collecting 48 starts. While he started a career-high 46 games in 2023-2024, that wasn’t the start of an uptrend. Kuminga was limited to just 10 starts last season.
Still, he averaged 24.3 minutes per game, which allowed him to put up impressive numbers, scoring 15.3 points per game on 45 percent shooting from the field. He also accounted for 4.6 rebounds and 2.2 assists per game throughout the year.
Being that he’s 22 and the hunt for his biggest payday yet, Kuminga will need to produce ahead of a potential free agency run next summer. The thought of that has convinced Kendrick Perkins that Kuminga could be an issue for the championship-hopeful Warriors.
“When you look at this situation, it’s going to cause turmoil in the locker room if you bring him back at $7.9 million because he’s going to go out there and play individual basketball,” Perkins added.
“It’s hard for me to tell a young guy not to go out there and get his numbers because I know he wants to get paid. At the end of the day, you have one guy who’s going to be playing agenda basketball. You’re going to have a team that’s led by three vets, probably three future Hall of Famers, that’s going to be leading their team and preaching agenda-free basketball. There’s the problem.”
