The good folks down in Atlanta were feeling themselves on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Or, at least, the few dozen fans who hadn\u2019t already beaten the traffic were.<\/p>\n
\u201cThank you, Warriors!\u201d was the chant from the lower bowl as Jonathan Kuminga stepped to the free-throw line during the Hawks\u2019 135-101 throttling of Portland.<\/p>\n
It was Atlanta\u2019s third straight win since acquiring the young forward, and suddenly, the narrative was set. Kuminga is thriving. The Hawks are rolling<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Dubs<\/a>, meanwhile, are a sad, depressing mess<\/a>.<\/p>\n The combination has made it incredibly fashionable to ask: Did the Golden State Warriors make a colossal mistake by trading Jonathan Kuminga to the Hawks?<\/p>\n The answer is a resounding yes.<\/p>\n But not for the reason the box-score watchers think.<\/p>\n The mistake wasn\u2019t finally pulling the plug on the Kuminga experiment. The mistake was dragging it out for years, stubbornly clutching a depreciating asset while better offers came and went.<\/p>\n Golden State\u2019s front office couldn\u2019t quit the idea of a young, athletic wing, ignoring a mountain of evidence that he simply did not fit \u2014 and that he had no plans on trying to anytime soon.<\/p>\n Their reward for this year-long bout of organizational denial? Kristaps Porzingis. A big man with a mysterious autoimmune disorder and a looming contract situation that will require two PhDs \u2014 one in immunology, one in capology \u2014 to figure out.<\/p>\n Jettisoning a former lottery pick for that kind of baggage isn\u2019t just selling low: It\u2019s a yard sale in a thunderstorm.<\/p>\n But trading Kuminga? That was the only thing the Warriors got right.<\/p>\n Kuminga looks good in red and yellow right now. He\u2019s putting up 21 points and 8 boards. The dunks are undeniably spectacular.<\/p>\n And he is unquestionably a better fit for what the Hawks do than what the Warriors do.<\/p>\n Atlanta plays a high-energy, run-and-gun system that feasts on the transition offense that it creates with its exceptional defensive length.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Kuminga is great at running fast and jumping high.<\/p>\n Furthermore, the Hawks run a five-out offense that swaps the center and power forward on the perimeter, giving him miles of space and asking absolutely nothing complicated of him. No deft cutting. No setting crucial off-ball screens.<\/p>\n He went from playing chess in the Bay to playing checkers in the A.<\/p>\n So naturally, other checkers players are looking at his early success has birthed the narrative that Golden State \u201cheld him back.\u201d<\/p>\n That argument only works if you conveniently ignore that the Warriors\u2019 complex, read-and-react system \u2014 the one that made Kuminga look like a man trying to read a menu in a dark restaurant \u2014 was built to maximize the greatest shooter who ever lived and produced four championship parades. The idea that Golden State should have blown up their offensive identity to accommodate Kuminga is patently absurd.<\/p>\n And yet that argument persists.<\/p>\n If those folks were to skip the YouTube highlights and ignore the box score and watch the actual games, a much different reality emerges.<\/p>\n This is the exact same Kuminga. He just has a greener light and weaker opponents.<\/p>\n So let\u2019s pump the brakes on the Springfield induction.<\/p>\n Kuminga is playing well, but he dropped these numbers against the Washington Wizards (twice) and the Portland Trail Blazers. The Wizards are currently operating as a basketball-themed tax write-off \u2014 they\u2019re doing everything in their power to lose as often as possible.<\/p>\n And against the Blazers on Sunday, Kuminga scored 11 of his 20 points in the fourth quarter of a game that was already a blowout. It\u2019s garbage-time heroics masquerading as a superstar turn. Just like old times.<\/p>\n Watch the tape. Guys are still blowing past him on defense. The ball still sticks in his hands on offense. It\u2019s the exact same stuff that drove Steve Kerr to the point of a breakdown.<\/p>\n But, again, the dunks are cool.<\/p>\n To be fair, there\u2019s a lot there for Atlanta to like. He\u2019s a pretty good player.<\/p>\n \u201cHe is really focused on moving the ball and being unselfish,\u201d Hawks coach Quin Snyder gushed last week.<\/p>\n Man, where have we heard that before?<\/p>\n Oh, right. That\u2019s the exact same thing Kerr said during Kuminga\u2019s five-game hot streak to start the year, right before he reverted to form and the relationship cratered.<\/p>\n Maybe Atlanta is the perfect basketball utopia for Kuminga. Maybe he\u2019ll shoot 67 percent from the floor for the rest of his natural life. Or maybe, just maybe, the guy is just the undisputed king of first impressions.<\/p>\n It\u2019ll be a while before Atlanta plays a team with a pulse, so the hype train will probably keep chugging along. The fans can keep chanting their sarcastic \u201cThank yous\u201d to the Bay Area all they want.<\/p>\n But let\u2019s check back in at the end of the campaign, when the opponents are serious and more than athleticism is required to win.<\/p>\n What will Atlanta fans still be chanting then?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The good folks down in Atlanta were feeling themselves on Sunday. Or, at least, the few dozen fans…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":625648,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3786],"tags":[7,159,160,479,164,4025,4024,155,165,6,161,162,163,66,198,255,158],"class_list":{"0":"post-635295","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-bay-area","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-golden-state","12":"tag-golden-state-warriors","13":"tag-goldenstate","14":"tag-goldenstatewarriors","15":"tag-inside-sports","16":"tag-latest-headlines","17":"tag-nba","18":"tag-peninsula","19":"tag-san-francisco","20":"tag-san-francisco-county","21":"tag-sports","22":"tag-sports-columnists","23":"tag-warriors","24":"tag-warriors-hq"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116161916784051124","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635295","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=635295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635295\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=635295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=635295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=635295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}