HOUSTON — Everybody around Jonathan Kuminga told him he had to keep his head up and stay ready for this. The Warriors’ stars said it when Kuminga was active but didn’t play three times in three very significant games. The younger players said it. The coaches said it.
Everybody really, really meant it, too.
Nobody knew that Jimmy Butler was about to go down hard on his back in the first quarter of Game 2 on Wednesday and eventually head to the locker room and onto a plane back to the Bay Area for further testing for what’s initially been described as a pelvic contusion. But for the last two weeks, everyone around the Warriors knew something like that might happen to somebody in the rotation. And Kuminga had to be ready to get up from this last demoralizing stretch on the bench and play hard.
“I feel like I have been ready,” Kuminga said in the locker room after he played 26 minutes in the Warriors’ 109-94 loss to the Rockets at Toyota Center — his first playing time in almost two weeks. “I hate the fact that everybody’s gotta tell me every other time, ‘Be ready, be ready.’ Because in my mental, my mindset, I already know that.
“I’m ready. The more you keep telling me ‘get ready,’ it’s kind of irritating. I’m always ready.”
Kuminga said this with a sly smile, not a snarl, but the interesting answer was just one more piece of this four-year enigma. Since he was the seventh overall pick in 2021, the Warriors have alternately praised him, played him, benched him, praised him some more, benched him again, and always said they might really need him at a pivotal time. The DNPs in the regular-season finale, play-in game, and Game 1 of this series seemed to settle most of the question — Kuminga probably won’t be a part of the Warriors’ future beyond this summer because he’s not part of their rotation in the present.
But wait: Maybe they need him right now. Just to survive this series. Butler might be able to play in Saturday’s Game 3 back at Chase Center, with the series currently tied 1-1. But he might be limited by this injury. Or Butler might be sidelined for a while.
Kuminga definitely looked rusty against the Rockets on Wednesday (making only 4 of his 12 shots) and absolutely couldn’t replicate 95% of the things Butler has done for them since his arrival in February — or 75% of the things Brandin Podziemski usually does but couldn’t on Wednesday because he was playing through an illness.
There was no way Kuminga by himself was going to lift the Warriors past the Rockets, who were committed to bouncing back from a shaky Game 1 performance. If Butler is out for a while, the Warriors are in trouble. Let’s just make sure everybody knows that.
But if the Warriors just need extra wing minutes to give Butler more breathers the rest of this series, well … they do have an option. On Wednesday, Kuminga found his way to the rim several times and seemed as comfortable as always going up and down the court against Houston’s batch of high-fliers. Kuminga was pulled from the rotation for very logical reasons — he doesn’t fit with a team reoriented around Butler. But with Butler possibly out or weakened … was Game 2 a preview for Kuminga playing time in the rest of this series?
“I think whether Jimmy’s out there or not, it feels like it can swing a different way (for Kuminga),” Stephen Curry said late Wednesday. “So that’s the challenge and it’s always been for him to see the pictures, understand the intensity that’s out there, try to be in the right spots defensively, and then when he has the opportunities to be aggressive on the offensive end, take ’em. We trust him when he has the ball in his hands.”
There are always Kuminga moments
Kuminga checked in a couple minutes after Butler was flipped over by a glancing blow from Houston’s Amen Thompson and looked like he was trying enormously hard to avoid the kind of mistakes that got him benched. He looked a little tentative. But there were some moments. With Kuminga, there are always moments. On Wednesday, he swished two free-and-easy three-pointers and made several smart passes.
“It felt great,” Kuminga said, speaking for the first time since the start of the stretch in which he didn’t play. “It’s not something that I was expecting, but always gotta stay ready no matter what. You never know what’s gonna happen. It’s something I wasn’t expecting to happen.
“I just went out there and just tried to do as much as I can. My best. We didn’t get the win. Hopefully we get the next one back home.”
Were the three DNPs difficult to deal with, Jonathan?
“For me, just looking at it, it’s kind of tough,” Kuminga said. “But there’s really nothing I can do about it. I can’t complain about it; I can’t do nothing about it. If I don’t play, that’s coach’s decision.”
Do you understand why you were benched?
“I try not to think about it,” Kuminga said. “I just try to stay ready. I try not to even think about why I’m not playing … because the more I think about that, the more it’s not going to sit right in my head. So I just block out all that noise and just stay focused on whenever I get my chance.”
‘We may need him’
Curry said he knew that Kuminga was coming in as soon as he saw Butler go out. Kerr, though, took a little while to get him in there — but eventually, he called for Kuminga to check in late in the first quarter. Kuminga jumped up from his seat on the bench and practically sprinted into the game.
“It wasn’t all great,” Kuminga said. “I feel like I could’ve done better. It was just trying to figure out where to be, what to do, how can I play. Just things like that.”
This wasn’t a Kuminga performance that will change everything about his destiny with the team — it’s still extremely likely that he will be elsewhere in July. But it sure wasn’t evidence that he should be locked to the bench the rest of this postseason.
“He’s been preparing every single day, keeping a great attitude,” Kerr said. “In Game 1, he was on the bench cheering the entire time. He’s a great young guy. JK’s an awesome young guy and his teammates respect him and pull for him.
“He stayed ready and got some minutes. And it’s good, because we may need him.”
Kerr, though, wasn’t committing to anything for Game 3 — whether Butler is in the lineup or not.
“We’ll see how it all plays out,” Kerr said. “If Jimmy’s out, we have to redo everything — rotations and who starts and best combinations and all that stuff.”
But on Wednesday, at least, Kuminga got into a big game at a big moment. It might be the last time this ever happens in his Warriors career. Or it might be the first of several of these games and still lead to his departure in the summer. It’s a little bit confusing. It’s hard to follow completely. And it couldn’t happen any other way.