Alex Caruso played a key role in the Oklahoma City Thunder winning the 2025 NBA championship, but he very well could have been playing for the Golden State Warriors instead. ESPN reports that the Chicago Bulls offered Caruso to the Warriors a couple of years ago, but the deal didn’t go through because team owner Joe Lacob did not want to include Jonathan Kuminga in it.
“Lacob has remained a staunch Kuminga supporter and vocal believer in his long-term future. He voiced an unwillingness to include Kuminga in a proposed trade from Chicago for Alex Caruso a couple of seasons back, sources said, and was still glowing about Kuminga’s performance in May after he rose from out of Steve Kerr’s first-round rotation to the team’s leading scorer in the second-round loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves.”
By all indicators, Lacob looks to be by far the biggest reason Kuminga is a Warrior today. He reportedly was the driving force behind the decision to draft the forward with the seventh pick in the 2021 NBA Draft. Some members of the coaching staff preferred Franz Wagner, but the owner was set on the Congolese.
Kuminga would show flashes of brilliance on the court for the Warriors, but head coach Steve Kerr never quite seemed to be his biggest fan. His playing time and role kept fluctuating, and the situation got bad enough in January 2024 to the point that it was reported that he had lost faith in Kerr.
Parting ways with Kuminga might have been in the Warriors’ best interests back then, but Lacob was never going to be on board with that. ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne had previously reported that he was the reason the forward was never included in trades.
You do wonder how many trades the Warriors turned down because Lacob was so high on Kuminga. Caruso is the one we now know about thanks to this report, and he’d have been a great fit. The guard made the All-Defensive First Team in 2023 and the Second Team in 2024.
Having a defender of Caruso’s caliber next to Draymond Green would have made the Warriors a terrific defensive team. While it’s hard to say whether they’d have won a championship with him, they probably would have come closer than they have with Kuminga.
Kerr didn’t even play Kuminga for much of the first round series against the Houston Rockets in the 2025 playoffs. The 22-year-old only got his opportunity to shine after Stephen Curry suffered a hamstring strain in Game 1 against the Minnesota Timberwolves in the Conference Semifinals.
Kuminga would average 26.3 points, 3.0 rebounds, 1.3 assists, 1.0 steals, and 0.7 blocks per game in his last three outings against the Timberwolves. Lacob was thrilled to see those displays, but he wouldn’t have been too pleased about what he had seen since then.
Kuminga rejected a two-year, $45 million deal from the Warriors earlier this offseason. The team upped the offer recently, putting a three-year, $75.2 million contract on the table, but that hasn’t been accepted either. It is a team option for the third year, and the Kuminga camp isn’t a fan of that.
We’ll just have to wait and see how this situation pans out.
