Jonathan Kuminga is a young man and still a very young player, but he’s enough of an NBA veteran to understand the tidal currents of a long season. And he’s enough of a wild card on this Warriors team to understand how much he can affect everything — for good or for chaos.
So Kuminga sat and watched what happened to the Warriors in the two months he missed with a severely sprained right ankle. He was right there, absorbing all the victories since Jimmy Butler’s arrival, waiting for his chance to get back on the court … and, yes, worrying a bit.
“It was just thinking when I come back I don’t want to mess things up — I don’t want to be the one,” Kuminga said with a grin after his return in Thursday’s easy victory over the Kings at Chase Center. “It’s just being nervous. Until you’re out there and you see everything is very easy.”
Will things always look as easy for Kuminga and the Warriors as they did in his return after missing 31 games? Probably not. There will be trouble spots for the team and 22-year-old dynamo. Even on Thursday, the Warriors got bogged down for a few minutes in the second quarter when they became far too anxious to set up Stephen Curry for his 4,000th career 3-pointer, and the Kings became way too aware of this. The Warriors eventually figured it out, Curry hit his milestone in the third quarter, the crowd went crazy, and everybody on the Warriors got back into the rhythm they’ve maintained since the early-February Butler trade. Including Kuminga, who didn’t look hurried, attacked the rim when the floor opened up, scored 18 points on 7-of-10 shooting, and just looked free-flowing and immensely dangerous to the opponent.
“He’s a hellafied athlete,” Butler said. “He’s a scorer. He wants to be great.”
All those things have been parts of the Kuminga dilemma in the past, of course. He’s so talented, as Steve Kerr puts it, that he’s capable of almost anything. The problem is picking among them. And sometimes it looked like Kuminga was trying to do all of them once.
But the Butler-era Warriors are a simplified team. They naturally run all the Stephen Curry classic movement stuff, but they also can get it to Butler whenever necessary and let him create something. And when Curry is out, Butler is the centerpiece and everybody works off of his creativity. Can Kuminga work within this framework, just cutting and dunking when the defenses over-tilt toward Curry and Butler? Well, yes.
“Not rushing,” Kuminga said when asked what his focus was in his return. “The nature of basketball when you come back [is that] you’re always going to try to rush and do extra things. And the way things are settled out there, you don’t really need to rush. You just have to be in the right position and things are going to go the way you want them to go.”