Kawakami: The Warriors and Jonathan Kuminga finally have a bridge to his next team

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The most passive-aggressive negotiation in recent Warriors history is over, but the Jonathan Kuminga situation goes on.

It’s definitely not over. Maybe the trickiest, weirdest part is finally completed, but there’s a lot left to finish with these two sides in the next year or so.

Basically, Tuesday’s much-delayed contract agreement is an interim accord on the way to figuring out the best terms for a final separation.

Or, if things get really crazy, maybe the Warriors and Kuminga will fall in love with each other all over again in the next few months, and this is the bridge to a long-term relationship.

But given the strains and frustrations of the past few years, that last part is exceedingly unlikely, which has been obvious from every bit of this long negotiation.

The entire reason it took so long for Kuminga and the Warriors to agree to a two-year, $48-million deal with a team option for the second year is because there was no way for the two sides to satisfy all desires or conclude all judgments under these conditions.

So it took all this time. And the delay held up the Warriors’ deals with Al Horford and De’Anthony Melton past the first practice of camp, which is not ideal.

At one point recently, Kuminga’s agent, Aaron Turner, awkwardly suggested that Kuminga would only be totally committed to doing all the things to help win another title at the end of Curry’s prime if the team option was switched to a player option. At another point, Turner said that Steve Kerr had proven he won’t commit fully to Kuminga.

So yeah, it could still get weird once Kuminga is back in the Warriors’ locker room, back trying to find a regular spot in the rotation, back under Kerr’s purview, and — this is different — perhaps a few months away from moving to a new team and larger opportunity.

But Curry and others made two things clear at Media Day on Monday: They expected Kuminga back in the fold soon, and they expected the vibes to be good when that happened.

The Warriors are very consciously separating Kuminga the Player from Kuminga the Negotiator, which is wise and not wrong. He’s a thoughtful guy. He wasn’t happy when he dropped out of the rotation late last season, but he’s far from a perpetual problem personality.

And whatever his agent did during the negotiations was not part of what the Warriors are trying to accomplish this season.

“We’ve been through a lot bigger deals than this,” Kerr said Tuesday afternoon, hours before the agreement hit the transom. “I don’t think this is that big of a deal. This is business. Contract disputes happen all the time in sports.”

This wasn’t a normal contract dispute, of course. Again, it lasted this long because there were major philosophical differences, and those differences will remain even after the new deal is signed.

Kuminga wants to be a team’s No. 1 option and has the physical talent that makes this seem possible. But just not on the Warriors, who have Curry and Jimmy Butler to fill all the top offensive roles.

So Kuminga will get his chance, maybe in January or February, or, perhaps, next offseason. For now, he gets $23 million for this season — then, if he’s traded, the acquiring team surely would want to sign him to a long-term deal almost immediately.

After the sign-and-trade option fell apart in the summer, this is a logical fallback for Kuminga.

By the way, the $7.9 million qualifying offer, even though Turner proclaimed in multiple interviews that he and Kuminga would be willing to sign it in order to guarantee unrestricted free agency next July, was never a good option for them with the two-year deal from the Warriors on the table all this time.

(I don’t know what happened to the reported — and generally confirmed — recent Warriors increase to a three-year offer with a team option on the third year and a $48-million guarantee, which seemed like a huge concession on their part and a pretty darn good deal for Kuminga. Maybe that offer was conditional on a specific date. Maybe that wasn’t really a firm offer. We’ll learn more later, I’m sure).

If Kuminga turned down the standing-offer first-year salary of about $23 million just to make sure he had more freedom, he would’ve walked away from more than $14 million that he might never have earned back. And he still wouldn’t have been sure about his next step.

Kuminga knew that. The Warriors knew that. But the two sides had to go through this shadow-dance to make sure Kuminga felt that the Warriors understood his value and to guarantee that the Warriors didn’t lose him as a future trade chip.

By the way, they can trade him starting on Jan. 15, with a salary that’s in the salary-matching sweet spot, the same way that Andrew Wiggins’ $27.2-million salary last year was the key to the Warriors’ acquisition of Butler at the February deadline.

The Warriors don’t have to trade him then, of course. Kuminga could be an important part of their regular-season rotation, especially on the nights they’re resting Butler, Draymond Green, or Curry and need somebody incredibly willing and able to put up a ton of shots and go defend somebody.

And if everything clicks for Kuminga in Year 5, he could fulfill everything Joe Lacob has been hoping for him. But again, that’s not the likeliest scenario. Kuminga and Turner didn’t negotiate that way. The Warriors sure didn’t negotiate that way.

The two sides had to go through a lot to get to this deal, and now they’ll have to go through some more to get Kuminga to his next team. But at least the oddest part is over.