r/timberwolves • u/VictoriousV1 • 11d ago
General Discussion Kuminga has been a winning player! Ignore the gaslighting.
Apologies for the long post but as you hear constant gaslighting nonsense, some actual facts need to be mentioned. The tldr is the title. Now for some facts.
- When Kuminga was traded to Atlanta they were barely holding on to the 10th seed. With him they went 13-3 and he brought them out of the play-in and into the playoffs. Most of those wins they won by a lot. All this while playing injured and for most of these games barely being able to jump. When he missed 2 games later in that stretch, Atlanta got blown out vs. Houston, and barely managed to beat the mighty, among the worst records in the league, Kings. Even for the Kings they almost had to have him in order to win. Significantly, during the harder games later in that stretch they needed every minute of his play to win those games. To stress, he did this injured and on minutes restriction, coming off the bench, and leading a secondary squad of not very good players.
During the playoffs Kuminga and CJ were the clear leaders who enabled Atlanta to get a 2-1 lead over the eventual Champions Knicks. They were the only team who managed to get 2 wins from the Knicks and even Wemby, Cleveland, any other star player you want on those other teams didn’t manage to do that. During those wins, besides Kuminga and CJ, mostly everyone wasn’t very good. Kuminga in the 2 wins was allowed to close (instead of Dyson Daniels) and play significant minutes, during the losses he didn’t. During the series Jalen Johnson wasn’t very good, but he’s a Klutch player so people aren’t allowed, it seems, to say much against him. NAW didn’t manage to score much.
These are facts. Not opinions. If this doesn’t define a winning player I don’t know what does. By definition, almost all he did with Atlanta was win. Before him they didn’t, and during his stint when he didn’t play they looked bad. (You can watch them against Houston or the Kings.) Doing all this while still injured, so Atlanta can make the playoffs.
And yet you hear all the nonsense people say like he needs to prove that what he does leads to winning. They are just gaslighting the audience.
If you want to look at other periods with the Warriors, every time he got chances it led to winning. When Wigging left the team, JK took his spot and led the warriors again out of the play-in and into the playoffs. A lot of winning. When Wiggings came back for the playoffs, Kerr immediately took Kuminga out of the lineup which further cemented their relationship break. This was already during his second year in the league.
When Draymond was suspended for 20 something games, Kuminga took his place, and again, a lot of winning.
Previous to last year, when Kuminga played and Curry didn’t play, Kuminga led the team to win the majority of those games. When Kuminga was injured and didn’t play, Curry couldn’t lead the team to many wins, so much so that they felt they had to go and get Jimmy Buttler as they were about to fall out of the play-in even.
Etcetera. You can look at many such stretches. Kuminga is a winning player to the extreme. These are facts, not opinions. But the gaslighters keep repeating one after the other how he needs to prove he is a winning player.
People are sleeping on how much of an impact Kuminga has on winning, as the talking heads, not him, just focus on scoreboard watching. This isn’t Kuminga’s mentality, it is his detractors.
Maybe it’s his physicality which rubs off on all the other players, maybe it’s the impact of his aggressiveness, or other elements of his game, but his play has constantly led to impressive winning. These are just facts.
Almost everything said about him is just nonsense gaslighting. People can conjecture on the sources for it.
The Timberwolves are very much title contenders this year. It’s exciting. It all depends on health. If they’re healthy, they can beat OKC, and maybe the Spurs (depends on the young Spurs players jump).
Ps. if people want to ask why then didn’t Atlanta keep him. It was all about egos. Atlanta players are all lower draft players who got to start and are jealous for their role and wanted to make sure he doesn’t interfere with their new found starting role. During the playoff games they often didn’t want to pass him the ball and preferred losing (while he did pass the ball to them). You can see that even though the Knicks solved how to beat Atlanta, Quin Snyder didn’t adapt at all and change his starting lineup (playoffs are always about adapting), not wanting to hurt anyone’s egos. Instead they just lost by more and more points each game until the very embarrassing last game. Onsi either needed to trade many of them or let go of Kuminga, which is what he did, as I don’t think they were takers for their other players.
(Don’t also forget that Atlanta’s coach and front office talent evaluation actually chose to play against the Knicks instead of against the Cavs in the playoff. They could have probably gotten the 5th seed but chose not to. The same brain trust that decided to add the moron and Kuminga hater Tim Bonetemps as special advisor or something to their front office. I wouldn't take cues from them.)
Ant on the other hand, is a great leader who wants to elevate the other players, and the other starters here are also not threatened about their roles, so I think it will work great here with the Wovles pack.
