There was a distinct, almost electric dissonance humming through the Chase Center on Tuesday night. If you looked at the box score in a vacuum—stripped of time, score, and reality—you saw a revelation. Jonathan Kuminga, the man exiled to the end of the bench for more than a month, erupted. Twenty-one points in 20 minutes. Seven-of-10 shooting. An athletic marvel finally unleashed.
It was objectively impressive.
But objectivity died on the floor right around the time the Raptors went up by 30.
What we witnessed Tuesday wasn’t a basketball game in the traditional sense. It was performance art. It was the Golden State Warriors entering their post-modern phase.
For those who didn’t spend their college years wearing turtlenecks and reading French philosophy, let’s simplify “post-modernism.” In the simplest terms, it’s a rejection of the grand narrative. It’s skepticism about the existence of a single “truth.”
In art, it’s when the style becomes more important than the substance.
In basketball? It’s what happens when the scoreboard stops being the point of the exercise.
It’s when the “truth” — winning the game — is replaced by the “vibe” — highlight reels.
That was the Warriors’ reality in their first game following Jimmy Butler’s right ACL tear on Monday. The grand narrative of a championship is dead.
And in the wreckage, we found something peculiar: a celebration of the meaningless.
Kuminga didn’t 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.
He finally got on the board with an alley-oop dunk.
That dunk cut the Raptors’ lead to 91-66.
But the crowd ate it up like it was a Steph Curry 3-pointer in a playoff game.
According to ESPN’s 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.
Kuminga played freely and sharply. He had himself a nice game in the service of absolutely nothing.
And yet, you’d think something special happened. It wasn’t just the online discourse or the relentless optimism of the broadcast; it was the building itself.
Joe Lacob was jumping out of his chair. He pumped his fist as his guy — the draft pick he has staked so much social capital on — led a spirited third-quarter run that successfully dipped the Raptors’ win probability from 99.9 percent to the mid-90s.
The peculiarity was simply too much to overlook.
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 — well, he better tap back into that reservoir, because in the final year of his contract, he is piloting a ghost ship.
The trade scenarios for Kuminga still don’t have a pulse. If you think a pump-and-dump is coming, it’s not.
Why trade for a piece to help you win when winning is no longer the operational goal? Kuminga’s destiny was always to become a featured player on a bad team — a guy who puts up numbers while the opponent coasts to a victory.
It appears that destiny has come to pass in San Francisco.
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 “Light Years” era was about competitive excellence.
But mere hours into this new stage of the Dubs’ campaign — and perhaps a new stage of the Warriors, overall — it seemed as if something else was prioritized. The crowd cheered, the owner pumped his fist, and the stats piled up.
They lost by 18. They trailed for all but the first 19 seconds.
But hey — vibes.
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