Jonathan Kuminga has become one of the most debated players around the Warriors, and the noise around him has gotten so loud that it can obscure the simplest question: what is he actually worth?
From a Warriors writer’s point of view, the answer sits somewhere between the dream and the disappointment. Kuminga has had enough eye-opening games to make people believe there’s more in there, and enough rough stretches to leave real doubts. After watching almost every one of his more than 300 games with Golden State, the read is clear enough: he probably isn’t on a superstar track, but he looks like a real rotation player who may be getting underrated in the current conversation.
The appeal starts with the way he gets downhill. Kuminga’s quickness and strength let him attack the rim with a kind of ease that makes him dangerous in transition and in broken possessions, especially when a defense is scrambling or missing rim protection. That part of his game has always made sense.
The half-court is where the picture gets messy. Teams can sag off him and live with the result because the shooting numbers have not forced them to do otherwise.
His career field goal-percentage is 39.0 percent from 10-16 feet, 31.4 percent from 16 feet to the three-point line, and 33.2 percent on threes. When he passes up those semi-open looks and tries to drive anyway, the lane often isn’t there.
If a defender is already set and not worrying about the jumper, Kuminga can get steered into a turnaround jumper after being cut off, and that’s not a great shot to build an offense around.
The cleanest version of Kuminga doesn’t ask him to do much self-creation in the half-court. He’s best as a screener and cutter, the kind of player who can work without dominating the ball.
The problem is that role can leave him untouched for long stretches, and that has clearly been hard for him at times. With the Warriors, there were moments when that lack of rhythm seemed to bother him, and when he finally did get an opportunity, he would press and try to force the issue.
That’s part of why his fit with the Timberwolves is so interesting. They have more ball-handling talent than the Warriors, which means Kuminga should not expect a heavy diet of touches.
But he does appear ready to accept that kind of role. If he does, he can be effective as a player who scores in double figures efficiently without needing the offense to bend around him.
He may not always be thrilled about how often he gets the ball, but the bet here is that he won’t hijack an offense in an attempt to chase 20 points per game the way some people fear.
Defensively, Kuminga brings a different kind of value. He’s versatile, he doesn’t back down, and he has shown he can handle tough assignments.
In the Knicks series, he spent possession after possession battling Karl-Anthony Towns and often kept the 7-footer from getting comfortable touches. Across many Warriors games, he was asked to guard the opposing team’s best ball-handler.
He’s never been a big steals-and-blocks guy, but the broader impact has been there. His Defensive EPM has landed in the 60th percentile or better in four straight years, and opposing teams have generally shot worse with him on the floor, which points to the difficulty he creates with his on-ball defense. In the playoffs, he posted the second-best defensive rating swing on the Hawks and the third-best net rating swing overall, according to Cleaning the Glass.
That stood in sharp contrast to his playoff work with the Warriors. Those runs were marked by ugly net ratings, and in the 2025 playoffs, Golden State was 9.9 points worse on defense when Kuminga played.
So no, this is not a case where he has clearly joined the league’s elite defenders. But it does feel fair to expect him to help more than hurt on that end with the Timberwolves.
The easiest way to frame his value is this: imagine the Warriors had signed a 23-year-old athletic forward who brings real rim pressure and can defend multiple positions. Imagine that player came at a two-year, $12.4 million price tag. That would look like a steal, the kind of deal you’d happily grade an A+ because he could easily outplay it in 2026-27 and maybe by a lot.
That doesn’t mean Kuminga belongs in the $25 million neighborhood. That kind of money usually goes to players with more offensive creation in their bag. But he should be worth at least the non-taxpayer mid-level exception, which will be about $16 million next year.
There’s also been speculation that the friction between Kuminga and Steve Kerr says something about how he’ll handle coaching from Chris Finch and future head coaches. The feeling here is that he’s beyond that now and ready to help his teams win in whatever role he’s given.
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