Jimmy Butler’s Injury Thrusts Steve Kerr And Jonathan Kuminga Once More Into The Hell Of Working Together

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Jimmy Butler’s season is over. His painful-looking collapse in the third quarter of Golden State’s win Monday night over the visiting Miami Heat was caused by the sudden kerplosion of his right ACL, a crisis that will require surgery and then many months of recovery. This stinks for Butler, who is now facing the most serious injury of his career during his age-36 season. Butler delivers and takes beatings, a consequence of his particular style of basketball, which aesthetically certainly is not for everyone. You have to grade durability on a curve: LaMelo Ball will miss 15 to 40 games per campaign due to having papier-maché ankles; Butler, meanwhile, played a solid majority of his team’s games every season for 13 years despite deploying his own tender body every night as a bulldozer, a forklift, a wrecking ball, an excavator, a railway stopblock, and a grenade. That he made it this long without any ligaments shredding catastrophically should be a real point of pride.

Lately he’d been cooking pretty good, and the Warriors had won 12 of 16 games to climb up to eighth in the Western Conference, a season-best six games over .500. Even with Butler, the Warriors are desperately cramped for offensive space and reliable shot-creation. Of the players who have played at least half of Golden State’s games this season, only Butler and Stephen Curry have posted usage rates over 20 percent, which does not seem like it should be possible and in any case cannot have been sustainable, not when those two players have a combined age of 73 years old. The next most engaged Warriors regular by usage, after Butler, is veteran DeAnthony Melton, who is working his way into form after missing the first month of the season while recovering from his own ACL injury; the next most engaged guy is reserve guard Pat Spencer, who despite Steve Kerr’s sweaty insistence to the contrary is 100 percent not “that motherfucker.” Across Golden State’s last 11 games Spencer has scored a grand total of three points.

It would sure be a luxury if the Warriors had another talented scorer in reserve, preferably someone with the floor skills and in-between game to handle some of Butler’s bruising creation duties, and the size to hold up at all when assigned to defend opposing swingmen. Unfortunately, such players nowadays cannot be had for less than, say, $22.5 million per season, an expenditure that would push a team with Golden State’s other salary commitments deep into the luxury tax. Obviously you cannot expect the Warriors—a tax-repeater, and thus subject to an onerous tax multiplier— to have splurged on such a thing, and thus to now be on the hook for an estimated tax bill for this season of more than $81 million. Obviously, had they made such a bold commitment, the player would already be in Kerr’s rotation, spelling Butler, absorbing an important share of the offense, and pushing washed-up bozo Buddy Hield to the very end of the bench. Especially if that player were just 23 years old, in good health, had cost the team a valuable lottery pick, and had averaged 21 points per game across the team’s most recent playoff series. Frankly, I don’t even know why we are still talking about this!

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Ahem. Now that I have reclaimed my laptop, in a shockingly violent confrontation, from the clutches of Golden State’s head coach, this blog is allowed to acknowledge the existence of Jonathan Kuminga, recently stranded in basketball purgatory. Kuminga—23 years old, healthy, acquired via the seventh pick in the 2021 NBA draft, and recently signed to an expensive two-year contract—fell out of Kerr’s rotation back in November and has not touched the court once since Dec. 18. In late October, Kerr was up there gassing up Kuminga’s development and affirming his security as a starter after an encouraging win; two weeks later Kuminga had devolved into a radioactive clump of dog turds, and could not be allowed to approach the court except in disaster scenarios. Kerr can’t stand Kuminga, and Kuminga is a clunky fit with the team’s ancient core, and the relationship is now so rotten that Kerr would rather dish opportunities at the likes of Will Richard and Gui Santos than give any burn at all to a guy who performed heroically for his team in a by-God playoff series just eight months ago.

The situation could not be much more awkward without one or both men having bits of spinach conspicuously lodged in their teeth. Kuminga, as a recent free-agent signing, did not become eligible for a trade until Jan. 15; that same day, he or his agents demanded that he be traded, and leaked the demand to Shams Charania of ESPN. Charania reported that everyone in the organization, including Kuminga’s teammates, agreed that he should be shipped out immediately. Not even five full days later, Kerr wakes up in a scenario where he cannot continue Kuminga’s exile, if for no other reason than because he otherwise lacks the human bodies necessary to fill out an NBA-grade rotation. As recently as yesterday afternoon, Kuminga was a distressed surplus asset with ruined trade value; today he is by default the second-best offensive player on a team that opened the weekend with perfectly credible playoff aspirations.

Kerr was asked Monday night whether Butler’s injury would open up an opportunity for Kuminga, who for all intents and purposes might as well have leprosy. “Sure, absolutely,” he responded, with approximately the same enthusiasm that I bring to the matter of whether my child can watch Frozen II at some point hopefully past the horizon of her toddler-grade short-term memory. The trade deadline is an aching, infinitely distant-seeming 16 days from now; teams in more stable conditions—roughly all of them—expect to use that time to sort themselves, and to capitalize on precisely the desperation now felt by Golden State, a team that cannot responsibly abandon any portion of what is left of Curry’s career. The Warriors play again Tuesday night, the second of a home back-to-back, and then they head on the road for a four-game set, including consecutive road meetings with the Timberwolves. Their season, and more than their season, is teetering. I hear that Zach LaVine might be available.