From the start of the Golden State Warriors’ first-round series against the Houston Rockets through Game 1 of their second-round matchup versus the Minnesota Timberwolves, young forward Jonathan Kuminga didn’t get much playing time.
Kuminga, who had averaged 15.3 points per game in the 2024-25 regular season, logged several DNPs during that time. Only after guard Stephen Curry went down with a hamstring injury against the Wolves did Warriors head coach Steve Kerr start handing Kuminga extended playing time.
Former NBA star big man DeMarcus Cousins, who played under Kerr on the Warriors for a brief time, weighed in on Kerr’s controversial decision to bench Kuminga early on in the 2025 NBA Playoffs and blasted his development of young players.
“I think they lost Kuminga,” Cousins said of the Warriors. “I think Steve Kerr ruined that relationship with the DNPs. We’ve seen this happen time and time again when it comes to him and dealing with young talent. He just doesn’t handle young talent well. He doesn’t develop young — I mean, out of the years he’s been there, we’ve seen one guy develop under Steve Kerr and they ran him off as well, and that was Jordan Poole. So, when it comes to young talent, I just don’t think they handle it well. And, I can see Kuminga being on the move.”
Poole spent his first four seasons in the NBA playing for Kerr’s Warriors, and he molded into one of the better scoring guards in the league during his Warriors tenure. He was an important part of the Warriors team that went on to win the 2022 NBA title, as he averaged 17.0 points per game while shooting 50.8 percent from the field and 39.1 percent from 3-point range across 22 contests (five starts) in the 2022 NBA Playoffs.
However, the Warriors traded Poole to the Washington Wizards following the 2022-23 campaign, and he’s fresh off a bounce-back campaign with the Wizards after a lackluster first season in the nation’s capital. He averaged a career-high 20.5 points per game in 68 appearances during the regular season.
Even though Kerr confined Kuminga to the bench for a solid chunk of Golden State’s playoff stint, he was arguably Golden State’s best player over the last four games of the team’s series against Minnesota. He scored 18-plus points in all of those contests, and his best scoring performance in that span came when he dropped 30 points in the Warriors’ Game 3 loss.
Kuminga is far too talented of a player to be getting DNPs for reasons that aren’t injury-related, and hopefully Kerr won’t make the same mistake that he made in the 2025 NBA Playoffs again in the future. However, there is a chance that Kuminga is playing for another team by the time the 2025-26 campaign rolls around.
