The dominos are finally starting to fall. Last week, more than two months after the start of free agency, Brooklyn Nets guard Cam Thomas bet on himself, taking the $6.6 million Qualifying Offer so that he can enter unrestricted free agency in a year. And on Tuesday, wing Josh Giddey agreed to a four-year, $100 million deal with the Chicago Bulls.
With that, half of the quartet of restricted free agents have found deals. Just two remain: Philadelphia 76ers guard Quentin Grimes, and Golden State Warriors
forward Jonathan Kuminga.
After Thomas left tens of millions on the table to take the Qualifying Offer, I wrote about the ways that it impacted Kuminga’s free agency. Now that Giddey has re-upped for nine figures, it’s brought the situation back to something of an equilibrium. The deal, which is fully guaranteed with no team options, provides a framework for what the Warriors could offer if they were determined to get Kuminga to sign. There’s a chance that if the Dubs offered Kuminga an identical contract, that he would ultimately turn it down in favor of betting on himself and making a larger payday down the road. But I’d bet there’s a very good chance that such a deal would be to his liking, and he would happily sign it.
Giddey’s contract does shift a small amount of leverage in Kuminga’s direction. In a summer that has reset the market in at-times perplexing ways, Kuminga now has a similarly-talented player in a similar situation, with an exact dollar figure that he can connect to it. There’s a concrete example that he can bring to the Dubs brass representing something similar to his worth.
Even better for Kuminga is that Giddey won’t be clogging the market next offseason, when a limited number of teams will have the cap space to sign an outside free agent to a large deal. Kuminga will already be sharing that space with Thomas if he accepts the Qualifying Offer, and now he knows he won’t also be competing with Giddey. That has to make him feel at least a little bit better about heading into the 2026-27 season without a contract.
And so Giddey’s large contract, like Thomas’ (relatively) modest one, provides a little something to make Kuminga’s case stronger, and a little something to give the Warriors additional leverage. Ultimately, the biggest impact that Giddey’s deal might have on JK and the Dubs is that it might just get us closer to seeing something happen.
We can hope, at least.
