play1:17JWill: I don’t trust Porzingis’ durabilityThe “Get Up” crew examines whether Kristaps Porzingis can be difference-maker for the Warriors.
Shams: Warriors’ pursuit of Giannis is over after Porzingis acquisition (1:53)Shams Charania breaks the news that the Warriors are trading Jonathan Kuminga and Buddy Hield to the Hawks in exchange for Kristaps Porzingis. (1:53)
JWill: I don’t trust Porzingis’ durabilityThe “Get Up” crew examines whether Kristaps Porzingis can be difference-maker for the Warriors.
Anthony SlaterFeb 11, 2026, 06:45 AM ETMultiple Authors
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.