Inside the ugly split between Jonathan Kuminga and the Warriors

THE MOST TENSE flare-up in what team sources otherwise described as a relatively cordial cold war between Jonathan Kuminga and Steve Kerr came on the afternoon of Dec. 10.

The Golden State Warriors had been eliminated from the NBA Cup two weeks earlier, giving them a rare break in the schedule. They’d won in Chicago the previous Sunday night and didn’t play again until Friday.

Kuminga was prepared for the conversation. He knew management wanted to ding him for missing a team-requested event and alert him that someone around him was taking too much food from the family room. The gripes between player and organization, as multiple sources said, had become “petty” in the fifth year of a relationship many believed should’ve ended years before.

Kerr never had much success reaching Kuminga on a deeper level, typically one of his coaching superpowers. He’d given him handwritten notes, sent long text messages, tried to connect. But Kuminga rarely reciprocated. Kuminga normally responded dispassionately and sporadically.

In ESPN’s several conversations with Kuminga over the past five years, it became increasingly clear that he viewed Kerr as the figure most responsible for holding back his career, long defined not by progression but rather inconsistency, inexplicable DNPs and tension.

“Go ask the man himself,” he’d say with an eye roll after a few of those no-minute or low-minute nights.

Organizational dynamics loomed above, forcing these two into an uncomfortable and drawn-out professional partnership, but Kuminga knew who controlled strategy and rotation.

Inside Kerr’s office that afternoon, exasperation boiled over. The discussion went from small picture to bigger picture. Frustrations were let out on both sides — Kerr voicing his displeasure with Kuminga’s lack of buy-in and competitiveness toward the team goals and Kuminga letting out his hurt about Kerr’s longtime lack of belief in him as a player.

The meeting ended, sources familiar with the exchange said, with Kerr slamming his white board in frustration. Kuminga, incidentally, then went out and delivered what Kerr would later describe as two of the most passionate practices he’d seen from him, running the floor, attacking the paint, defending with force.

“He did the things I asked him to do,” Kerr said. “I do feel for him that he has been sort of at the whim of my decision-making.”

But just like every brief stretch of harmony between Kuminga and the Warriors, it was fleeting and ultimately doomed, built on a double-layered foundation of misalignment. On the ground level, the player and coach were in complete disagreement on career arc and vision.

Above them, team owner Joe Lacob had bonded with Kuminga at a Miami dinner during the 2021 predraft process and gripped onto the idea that Kuminga could still become a face of the franchise’s next era at several forks in the road. But Lacob was too unwilling to move off a dream that didn’t fit the roster or system, one his coaching staff didn’t desire to execute, team sources said.

“Let your basketball people make basketball decisions,” one team source said.

Last week, the Warriors finally granted Kuminga’s wish and traded him to the Atlanta Hawks for Kristaps Porzingis, ending one of the strangest five-season tenures in recent league history.

“Everybody was right. Everybody was wrong. Everyone’s to blame,” another team source said. “Nobody won.”

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IN LATE DECEMBER, amid his third lengthy stretch of DNPs this season, Kuminga started to box up belongings in his Bay Area house, sources close to him said, anticipating a trade and essentially attempting to will it into existence.

He showed up when required and cheered for teammates at games, but he had his skills trainer, Ant Wells, in town to do individual training at different gyms away from the facility, feeling an increasing eye of distaste from Warriors management and coaches when he’d work on drills to improve his on-ball scoring and playmaking in front of them.

“He hates working out in this place,” one source said, pointing down toward the practice court.

Kerr had long made comparisons to Shawn Marion and Aaron Gordon, believing Kuminga’s best career stretches came as an energy wing who sprinted the floor, operated out of the dunker spot, rebounded, defended with versatility and didn’t need offense run through him. Those high-level role-playing wings, Kerr emphasized, are valued and compensated well.

But as Kuminga’s career developed, Kuminga believed he’d shown enough in supplementary roles to have earned more consistent trust and on-ball opportunity.

Neither happened to his liking, sources said, only hardening his belief that Kerr and general manager Mike Dunleavy would only ever view him as a run-fast, jump-high athlete without the requisite skill to be a lead option.

In response, both Kerr and Dunleavy would often cite Kuminga’s lower efficiency numbers in isolation and in the midrange as proof of their reasoning. They blamed Kuminga’s agent Aaron Turner and those around Kuminga, team sources said, for prioritizing and working “on the wrong things” away from the facility, routing his career down an incorrect path.

The disconnect affected contract negotiations, and multiple members of the organization questioned whether it was more important for him to win or to win his way.

The list of minor comments and subtle jabs about his limitations fueled Kuminga’s resentment and soured him toward the staff and organization, sources said, often leaving his closest allies — Turner, Wells, assistant coach Anthony Vereen, Jimmy Butler and others — to calm and refocus him on the ultimate mission.

Kuminga has fierce self-belief in what he can become — a “multiple-time All-Star,” he once told ESPN — which was emboldened only after Kerr was forced to turn to him in the Minnesota playoff series last May when Stephen Curry went down with a hamstring injury and Kuminga went for 18, 30, 23 and 26 points on 55% shooting the last four games against a group of Timberwolves defenders his teammates had struggled with.

In the lead-up to free agency last July, nobody from the organization visited Kuminga, a restricted free agent, in Cleveland during a month of two-a-day workouts, which only reinforced his lack of belief in Kerr, Dunleavy and the organization’s desire to prioritize and develop him.

In a preseason practice in October, the Warriors were working through some late-clock offense. Assistant coach Terry Stotts was delivering instruction.

The directive to the first unit was simple: get the ball to Curry or Butler and let them create. The directive to the second unit was more nebulous, team sources said: If neither Butler nor Curry was on the court, they didn’t really have much creation, so get the ball up top to Pat Spencer and run some pick-and-roll. There was no mention of Kuminga. He steamed about it.

“Those are all triggers,” Turner told ESPN. “Pokes.”

Despite the unraveling, Kuminga played a contributing role during various stretches of his Golden State career. As a rookie, he started three playoff games and logged 138 postseason minutes during the team’s 2022 title run.

His first true breakthrough came in his second season. Veteran wing Andrew Wiggins left the Warriors for the final two months to be around his ailing father. In his absence, Kuminga played 24.2 minutes per game after the All-Star break and averaged 13.2 points on 57% shooting as a major role-playing cog in the team’s sprint to the No. 6 seed.

In his third season, Draymond Green was suspended for a large chunk of the first few months, cracking open another door. Kuminga averaged 16.1 points in 74 games and set a franchise record with 138 dunks.

During this time, Kuminga believed Lacob and the entire front office backed him. Dunleavy called him “virtually untouchable” and told Kuminga directly that he viewed him as a “cornerstone.”

But extension talks that summer never generated traction. The Warriors, sources said, believed Turner’s expectations were far too high, using the five-year, $150 million contract Jalen Johnson signed with the Hawks as a comparison, and Turner says he believes they never made a genuine effort to extend him, regularly preaching “flexibility” in talks.

“JK’s taken off,” Green said during Kuminga’s third season. “That has kind of set the stage for this team. [He’s a] bona fide No. 2 option on our team.”

But Kuminga often disappeared from the picture when Kerr went searching for an adjustment during a rough patch.

The persistent pleas for patience — that he’d be foundational to the team’s post-Curry era — grew tired. Kuminga, sources said, felt the messaging became disingenuous and their view of his game disrespectful.

“We were always very clear about JK and what we believe he can be,” Turner said. “They were the ones not on the same page. They couldn’t figure it out amongst themselves.”

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AFTER A MONTH of tense contract negotiations had stalled last summer, Dunleavy and Lacob met with Kuminga and Turner in Miami in an attempt to sort through the scar tissue and distrust.

The 2025 restricted free agency market had delivered Kuminga and Turner a cold reality, but they felt Kerr’s inability to maximize Kuminga’s skill set and continued public comments about his lack of fit had contributed to it.

Lacob acknowledged the disconnect and the imperfect setup, sources said.

“[Kerr] didn’t even want to draft me,” Kuminga said in the meeting.

The Warriors selected Kuminga with the No. 7 pick in the 2021 draft, a lottery pick they received from the Minnesota Timberwolves in the D’Angelo Russell trade for Wiggins.

Kerr wasn’t a major part of the draft process. He was with Team USA preparing for the Tokyo Olympics that summer, and he was receiving only occasional reports from afar and didn’t have a firm opinion on Kuminga, according to team sources.

The Warriors had two lottery picks and worked out more than 70 prospects during the predraft process, including Franz Wagner, the German wing who went No. 8 to the Orlando Magic. There was a group of coaches on the staff who attended Wagner’s workout, team sources said, and came away adamant he’d be an ideal choice and fit in Kerr’s system.

Lacob and then-general manager Bob Myers were among a select few who visited Kuminga in Miami six days before the draft. Then-assistant coach Kenny Atkinson ran the workout and maintained strong belief in Kuminga through his final days with the organization. He left for the Cleveland Cavaliers head coaching job in 2024.

When the Warriors were on the clock six days after the Miami workout, both Kuminga and Wagner were on the board, and Lacob pushed for his preferred option, team sources said. Myers and Dunleavy, then an assistant GM, didn’t object.

“Bob and I have felt for several years that we’ve needed physicality,” Lacob said that night. “Athleticism and physicality. That’s what really excites me about him.”

The decision to draft Kuminga over Wagner, who has averaged at least 20 points per game the past three seasons, became a central tension point across the organization, a signature example of Lacob’s personnel meddling in the post-Kevin Durant transition years, aiming for, as team sources said, style over the substance that made the dynasty teams hum.

In the seasons that followed, team sources theorized that Lacob’s outward public belief in Kuminga and his animated celebrations of Kuminga’s big moments stemmed from his desire to be proved correct in his original assessment. It’s also why, those sources believed, Lacob had a difficult time sending out Kuminga in potential trades.

That included talks to land Alex Caruso from the Chicago Bulls at the 2024 trade deadline, viewed by some in the organization as the prime opportunity they should’ve pounced. Other team sources counter, indicating that Chicago was finicky in late-stage negotiations and remind that Kuminga was a major rotation option at the time.

“Joe gets outsized blame,” one source said. “Complex situation. There was a ton of indecision [from several people].”

Kuminga would’ve been involved in the Warriors’ much-discussed deal for Durant at the 2025 deadline, a move that Lacob green-lit and nearly crossed the finish line before Durant ultimately vetoed the move. There was also a possibility, sources said, of trading Kuminga to the Indiana Pacers before the 2023 draft for the No. 8 pick, which became Jarace Walker.

But nothing ever materialized — either because of internal indecision or external machinations. And the cold war, between player and coach, between the front office and ownership, continued to simmer.

Last summer, Turner and Kuminga found sign-and-trade opportunities with the Sacramento Kings and Phoenix Suns. Kuminga got on a video call with Kings general manager Scott Perry and coach Doug Christie. They pitched him on a feature role and 30-plus minutes a game, preaching the type of belief and growth opportunity he craved.

The Warriors balked at the available returns, showing no interest in Malik Monk, Royce O’Neale or Grayson Allen, plus minor draft capital.

One of the common retorts, according to league sources: Lacob would never agree to it.

The Warriors, team sources said, believed Kuminga needed to be delivered a colder reality of the existing business dynamics. Kuminga, sources said, was just tired of being a “pawn” in an organizational tug-of-war: coach won’t play him, management won’t relinquish him, freezing his career.

Turner and Kuminga took their external negotiations to the buzzer, signing a two-year deal in late September. That affected the ability to complete the signings of Al Horford, De’Anthony Melton, Gary Payton II and Seth Curry until after training camp started. That particularly frustrated Kerr, team sources said, who told those involved in the negotiations that it was another example of Kuminga putting himself over the team.

Kuminga’s teammates backed him publicly to the end but expressed their annoyances about the never-ending nature of the saga. Butler took Kuminga under his wing and Kuminga left viewing him as a genuine mentor, sources said, with Butler voicing to some that he felt there was an organizational double standard in the way Kuminga was treated compared with others.

“Everybody liked him,” Kerr said. “I liked him. He’s a really good guy. Very personable. Well-liked in the locker room. Just a tough fit.”

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THREE DAYS BEFORE the blowup in Kerr’s office on Dec. 10, Kuminga didn’t play in the team’s win in Chicago, his first benching of his fifth season.

In the aftermath, reporters crowded around Kuminga’s locker for a five-minute back-and-forth on Kerr’s rotation choices. Kuminga said he would accept it and stay ready. His relationship with Kerr was fine, he said. Those talking points didn’t necessarily represent how he felt in private.

After reporters filtered out, he called ESPN over with a question.

“Y’all ask him about me?” he said.

The reporters had. About 15 minutes earlier, Kerr was questioned about his choice to again remove Kuminga entirely from his rotation. Kuminga wanted to see the clip.

“Happens to everyone in the league,” Kerr said. “Other than the stars.”

Kuminga viewed that last quip as another subtle dig, sending the public another unnecessary reminder that Kuminga isn’t who he believes himself to be.

“See,” Kuminga said. “That’s the s— I’m talking about. Why does he got to say that?”

Kuminga started the first 12 games of his fifth season. He was a major two-way catalyst in the team’s 4-1 start, prompting Kerr to declare him an entrenched starter and sparking another wave of belief that maybe this time was different.

But everyone aware of the dynamics at play warned that history would probably serve as precedent. The Warriors hit a rough patch, dropped to 6-6 amid the spacing issues in their starting lineup that Kerr had anticipated.

He wasn’t going to bench Green or Butler, so Kerr took Kuminga out of the starting lineup. Kuminga’s knee began bothering him the night before in Oklahoma City, and after 12 first-half minutes, he left the game. The Warriors ripped off a spirited win over the Spurs behind 46 points from Stephen Curry.

After the game, Kerr said the Warriors had “rediscovered” their identity: “That just looked like our team out there.”

Kuminga, sources said, viewed the statement as yet another public signal that his game wasn’t viewed as part of the team’s identity, that he was again the convenient scapegoat. The wounds of the past five years weren’t difficult to reopen.

Kuminga took his time returning from knee tendinitis, frustrating Kerr and the organization.

“I don’t sugarcoat [my messaging],” Kerr told ESPN. “I’m honest with the media. I’m honest with players and sometimes you have to tell players something they don’t want to hear. I think in general it’s a healthy way to coach. I think it can be very difficult for a young player finding his way. I’m sure I said a couple of things that hurt him, but I don’t know that I ever said anything that would be called inflammatory.”

Over the next two months, Kuminga would play only 117 more minutes as a member of the Warriors. That included 16 straight DNPs.

Within that stretch, sources said Kuminga was asked to go onto the court four times, but he declined three mop-up duty opportunities and ruled himself out of the Thunder game on Jan. 2 because of back soreness after Kerr said he’d get a chunk of minutes with Curry, Butler and Green out.

Members of the coaching staff and front office, team sources said, viewed that deactivation against the Thunder as the unofficial end, a sign he’d quit on the team.

Kuminga, sources said, felt that they’d already quit on him and viewed the sudden request to go from ice cold and rotting on the end of the bench to a national TV date with the defending champions as a recipe to shame him. He was sore from weight work and declined their latest request to be the in-case-of-emergency option.

In the weeks leading up to the trade deadline, several members of the organization described the biggest need on the current Warriors roster.

That player, they said, was a big scoring wing, one who used athleticism to affect the game in a variety of ways but embraced the idea of being a play-finisher and not always a play-starter.

“Basically the Jonathan Kuminga from the first couple weeks.” one team source said. “Or his third season.”

But even the staunchest Kuminga backers — and there were several, including Butler — came to understand that there was no future left to imagine. The priorities and agendas of those involved were too misaligned, the development too bungled, the relationship too frayed.

So the Warriors traded him to Atlanta for Porzingis’ expiring contract. Kuminga will debut with the Hawks after the All-Star break. The runway isn’t completely clear, but it’ll serve as enough of a fresh start where the built-in excuses will fade away and eventually his talent either will or won’t blossom in the way those around him believe it will — and Kerr and Dunleavy didn’t.

Kerr recently expressed regret, acknowledging his part in the multilayered deterioration of what is now the signature failure of Golden State’s two-timeline approach. Dunleavy briefly said he’d echo Kerr’s comments when asked about the circumstances. Lacob declined to comment for the story. Kuminga has yet to speak on his departure.

“The Warriors shorted Jonathan Kuminga and we’re long on Jonathan Kuminga,” Turner said. “Clearly the bet was made. Game on. Let’s find out who is right.”