MINNEAPOLIS — Jonathan Kuminga had better offers. The Los Angeles Lakers, who are trying to build something around Luka Doncic, came in with three years and more than $12 million per season, a guaranteed starting role and a market that would have made him one of the bigger names in the league’s most visible city. The Chicago Bulls and the Portland Trail Blazers were also in the mix. There was no shortage of places willing to pay.
He took two years and $12.4 million in Minneapolis instead. The decision, made over the last two weeks of August, came down to one phone call, one four-hour meeting in Miami, and a pitch that had almost nothing to do with money.
“If you come here, we’re gonna focus on the defensive end,” Anthony Edwards told Kuminga. “We’re gonna be a really tough defensive team to play against with you and me and Rudy and Jaden McDaniels.”
Then he added something more specific. “I know that you can cook offensively,” Edwards said. “If there’s a matchup night where you just have the fourth-best defender on you, I’m gonna say go get him.”
That is how the Minnesota Timberwolves close free agents in 2026. Not with a bigger offer. Not with a market pitch. With their franchise player on the phone, speaking directly about defensive identity and matchup hunting, making it clear that Kuminga’s skill set has a specific home in what they are trying to build.
The pitch landed. The deal is done. Now the much harder question: can it hold?
Kuminga, who turns 24 in October, arrived at the deal from a complicated trajectory. The Golden State Warriors drafted him seventh overall in 2021, and he won a championship there as a 19-year-old in 2022. Three seasons later, the relationship had collapsed to the point where the Warriors traded him to the Atlanta Hawks at midseason, the Hawks declined his $24.3 million player option, and Kuminga arrived in free agency carrying career averages of 12.5 points, 4.2 rebounds and 1.8 assists across 294 games, numbers that had always hinted at an elite ceiling and never quite justified the description.
Edwards saw something specific in those averages that everyone else missed. During Kuminga’s time with Golden State, he had played a game against the Timberwolves that Edwards had apparently studied in detail. “You had the fourth-best defender on you that game,” Edwards recalled, according to beat reporter Jon Krawczynski, who revealed details of the pitch on SiriusXM NBA Radio Thursday. “You went off.” That game became the recruiting language.
Tim Connelly, the Timberwolves’ president, made the trip to Miami himself for a four-hour in-person meeting with Kuminga’s camp. Coach Chris Finch followed with conversations about Kuminga’s role, detailing a ball-movement-heavy offense built around his cutting and transition ability, with freedom to be aggressive in matchup situations. The message from every level of the organization was the same: this is a place where your specific skills fit.
Kuminga chose it over a longer guarantee in Los Angeles. According to Bleacher Report, the player option in his Minnesota deal allows him to return to free agency after one season. Kuminga was not closing a door. He was holding it open.
His agent Aaron Turner made that plain. “Next year is a way better free agency year for him,” Turner said on FanDuel TV, pointing to Sacramento and Chicago as teams projected to carry significant cap space in 2027. The Timberwolves built a championship contender. They just added a player whose representative is already mapping the route to the exit.
Whether that exit becomes relevant depends on what the next eight months look like. The projected starting lineup around Kuminga is genuinely imposing: LaMelo Ball, acquired in the Naz Reid trade to Charlotte, running the point alongside Edwards, Jaden McDaniels locking up the opposition’s best wing, Kuminga covering the physical forwards nobody wants to guard, and Rudy Gobert anchoring the paint. If that team executes at its ceiling, Kuminga might not want to leave.
That is exactly what Edwards was selling in Miami. Not money. Not market. The version of Jonathan Kuminga that goes after the fourth-best defender, the one who cuts off the catches Edwards sets up, the one who makes a 53-win team into something harder to beat in April. Whether the Lakers’ offer was smarter financially is not the question Edwards was asking. He was asking whether Kuminga wanted to be the player Edwards had already decided he could be.
Kuminga said yes. That conversation is not how free agency is supposed to work, and it is entirely how it works now, in an era when the franchise player does the closing. The Timberwolves have their piece. Whether it fits the way Edwards promised, and whether Kuminga is still here to test it past one season, will be answered on a different schedule, on a court in Minneapolis, where the stakes for both men are higher than the contract.
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