The Golden State Warriors and their summer of idleness has hit another point of almost-news. Not content with their current stalemate with restricted free agent Jonathan Kuminga, the Warriors have reportedly reached out to the Chicago Bulls about their own unsigned restricted free agent, Josh Giddey.
In theory, sending Giddey to the Warriors and Kuminga and the Bulls would solve both teams’ immediate problems. The Bulls don’t want to meet Giddey’s asking price of $30M per season, while the Warriors don’t want to send Kuminga to the Sacramento Kings in a complicated sign-and-trade for Malik Monk where they’d have to ditch one or more rotation players. They also apparently don’t want to give Kuminga a player option, a no-trade clause, guaranteed starting time, a good parking spot, free Big Face Coffee, or the opportunity to balance plates while riding a unicycle as halftime performer “Redder Panda.”
The problem is the dreaded base-year compensation rules. Kuminga is already hard to trade because for the Warriors’ purposes, Kuminga’s outgoing salary is counted at 50% of its average value. For the team who receives Kuminga, they get tolled for his full salary. That’s also the case for Giddey, meaning that even if the two restricted free agents signed the exact same contract, the Warriors and Bulls would have to find at least one other team to balance the money.
Giddey and Kuminga were picked consecutively in the 2021 NBA draft, at No. 6 and No. 7. If the Oklahoma City Thunder had drafted Kuminga instead, the Warriors may well have gone with Giddey, especially given their perpetual interest in Australian players. Arguably, the players could be better fits on each other’s teams, as the Bulls have a glut of point guards with Coby White, Ayo Dosunmu, Tre Jones, and Jevon Carter all under contract. The Warriors have struggled to find lineups where Kuminga can play alongside Jimmy Butler and/or Draymond Green without destroying their spacing.
On a Bleacher Report live stream, Jake “The People’s Insider” Fischer reported about the interest NBA teams have shown in Giddey.
“I can report that there have been multiple teams that have reached out to Josh Giddey’s representation about having interest,” said Fischer. “Golden State would be interested, depending on how the machinations would go, in some kind of Josh Giddey-Jonathan Kuminga sign-and-trade, to my understanding.”
Kuminga has come up in trade talks with the Bulls before, both in last season’s unrealized deals for Zach LaVine and/or Nikola Vucevic, and earlier trade queries about guard Alex Caruso, who was eventually traded to the Thunder for Giddey. It’s unclear if the Bulls are still interested, or they’ve shifted their attention to the potentially massive amount of salary cap space they can generate for next summer when the contracts of Nikola Vucevic, Zach Collins, Kevin Huerter, Dalen Terry, White, Dosunmu, and Carter all expire. Then they could possibly sign Kuminga outright, depending on what kind of contract he eventually signs.
However, this feels like a situation where the Warriors are looking for any possibility to resolve the Kuminga standoff, even an incredibly complicated option like a double-S&T. It’s not even clear that they’re willing to meet Giddey’s contract demands that the Bulls are ignoring.
Restricted free agency is fundamentally unfair to players. That’s why the likeliest outcome remains that both Giddey and Kuminga return to their current team and the Warriors settle for just two Australians.