{"id":551343,"date":"2026-01-21T17:16:15","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T17:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/551343\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T17:16:15","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T17:16:15","slug":"the-warriors-kuminga-embrace-the-art-of-losing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/551343\/","title":{"rendered":"The Warriors, Kuminga embrace the art of losing"},"content":{"rendered":"

There was a distinct, almost electric dissonance humming through the Chase Center on Tuesday night. If you looked at the box score<\/a> in a vacuum\u2014stripped of time, score, and reality\u2014you saw a revelation. Jonathan Kuminga<\/a>, the man exiled to the end of the bench for more than a month, erupted. Twenty-one points in 20 minutes<\/a>. Seven-of-10 shooting. An athletic marvel finally unleashed.<\/p>\n

It was objectively impressive.<\/p>\n

But objectivity died on the floor right around the time the Raptors went up by 30.<\/p>\n

What we witnessed Tuesday wasn\u2019t a basketball game in the traditional sense. It was performance art. It was the Golden State Warriors entering their post-modern phase.<\/p>\n

For those who didn\u2019t spend their college years wearing turtlenecks and reading French philosophy, let\u2019s simplify \u201cpost-modernism.\u201d In the simplest terms, it\u2019s a rejection of the grand narrative. It\u2019s skepticism about the existence of a single \u201ctruth.\u201d<\/p>\n

In art, it\u2019s when the style becomes more important than the substance.<\/p>\n

In basketball? It\u2019s what happens when the scoreboard stops being the point of the exercise.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s when the \u201ctruth\u201d \u2014 winning the game \u2014 is replaced by the \u201cvibe\u201d \u2014 highlight reels.<\/p>\n

That was the Warriors\u2019 reality in their first game following Jimmy Butler\u2019s right ACL tear on Monday. The grand narrative of a championship is dead.<\/p>\n

And in the wreckage, we found something peculiar: a celebration of the meaningless.<\/p>\n

Kuminga didn\u2019t even score in his initial playing time, a second-quarter stint. And when the Warriors turned to him halfway through the third, the game was already an autopsy.<\/p>\n

He finally got on the board with an alley-oop dunk.<\/p>\n

That dunk cut the Raptors\u2019 lead to 91-66.<\/p>\n

But the crowd ate it up like it was a Steph Curry 3-pointer in a playoff game.<\/p>\n

According to ESPN\u2019s analytics, at the exact moment Kuminga registered his first point, Toronto held a 99.3 percent chance of winning. There was no pressure in that moment or the 17-plus minutes of game time that followed. The contest was over.<\/p>\n

Kuminga played freely and sharply. He had himself a nice game in the service of absolutely nothing.<\/p>\n

And yet, you\u2019d think something special happened. It wasn\u2019t just the online discourse or the relentless optimism of the broadcast; it was the building itself.<\/p>\n

Joe Lacob was jumping out of his chair. He pumped his fist as his guy \u2014 the draft pick he has staked so much social capital on \u2014 led a spirited third-quarter run that successfully dipped the Raptors\u2019 win probability from 99.9 percent to the mid-90s.<\/p>\n

The peculiarity was simply too much to overlook.<\/p>\n

You could feel the resignation radiating off Warriors coach Steve Kerr. This is a man who once claimed his favorite team to coach was the 2020 cellar-dwellers because of their scrappy energy \u2014 well, he better tap back into that reservoir, because in the final year of his contract, he is piloting a ghost ship.<\/p>\n

The trade scenarios for Kuminga still don\u2019t have a pulse. If you think a pump-and-dump is coming, it\u2019s not.<\/p>\n

Why trade for a piece to help you win when winning is no longer the operational goal? Kuminga\u2019s destiny was always to become a featured player on a bad team \u2014 a guy who puts up numbers while the opponent coasts to a victory.<\/p>\n

It appears that destiny has come to pass in San Francisco.<\/p>\n

Here, I thought the goal for this franchise was to win, even in a post-Butler era where a title is certainly out of the question. We assumed the \u201cLight Years\u201d era was about competitive excellence.<\/p>\n

But mere hours into this new stage of the Dubs\u2019 campaign \u2014 and perhaps a new stage of the Warriors, overall \u2014 it seemed as if something else was prioritized. The crowd cheered, the owner pumped his fist, and the stats piled up.<\/p>\n

They lost by 18. They trailed for all but the first 19 seconds.<\/p>\n

But hey \u2014 vibes.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There was a distinct, almost electric dissonance humming through the Chase Center on Tuesday night. If you looked…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":551344,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3786],"tags":[7,479,164,4025,4024,155,165,6,66,198,255,158],"class_list":{"0":"post-551343","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golden-state-warriors","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-golden-state","10":"tag-golden-state-warriors","11":"tag-goldenstate","12":"tag-goldenstatewarriors","13":"tag-inside-sports","14":"tag-latest-headlines","15":"tag-nba","16":"tag-sports","17":"tag-sports-columnists","18":"tag-warriors","19":"tag-warriors-hq"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/115934225061353279","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/551344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}