Trade allows Kings, Cousins to turn page
No matter what side of the DeMarcus Cousins debate you were on in Sacramento, there was one indisputable reality about his sixplus-season tenure with the Kings: It was exhausting.
From the day he arrived as a 19-year-old and started clashing with then-coach Paul Westphal to the rainy night when he held back tears and said goodbye to his supporters inside a sushi restaurant just outside the city limits, the Cousins experience was always an emotional roller coaster.
Fans who loved him despite his mercurial ways were never truly rewarded. Cousins’ monstrous individual production always came amid abject failure and dysfunction (a .353 winning percentage in his time there, with one ownership change, five coaching changes and two front-office overhauls). Those who grew tired of his act, who objected to the outbursts and the obstinence and the unhealthy way in which the Kings always seemed to give in to his domineering ways, would wonder aloud in their homes and on local sports talk radio about whether he could truly lead them back to prominence.
There was perhaps no better example of Cousins’ divisive powers than the reaction of two prominent radio personalities on Sacramento sports station KHTK.
Grant Napear, the afternoon host who has been a traveling television announcer for the Kings since 1988, lambasted Cousins on Twitter in the days after the move and celebrated his departure. Meanwhile, fellow radio man Dave Weiglein, aka Carmichael Dave, wrote a 2,826-word column explaining his respect and admiration for complicated Cousins.
So with the Kings three games into life without Cousins after the trade that sent him to the New Orleans Pelicans, it came as no surprise that many of the main characters in his Sacramento story weren’t eager to relive the ride.
Westphal, who once revealed a Cousins trade demand by way of an official team statement just days before he was fired in January 2012, didn’t return a call for comment. Current Kings president of basketball operations Vlade Divac, who granted a detailed interview to the The Sacra
mento Bee last weekend to explain the move and declared, “It was time to start over,” politely declined to discuss it all again.
What’s done is done, they all said in their own way, no matter how badly the Kings were hammered by Cousins’ decimated market.
They were fleeced, of course, in part because of the red flags surrounding Cousins and also because the scare tactics employed around the league by his agents worked (they were pushing for the five-year, $207 million exten- sion this summer that only the Kings could provide, and it ultimately backfired on both sides).
But no matter the haul — in this case Buddy Hield, Tyreke Evans, Langston Galloway, a firstand second-round draft pick in 2017 — this was a basketball divorce a long time in the making.
“I’m not sure about weighing in on this other than (to say) it’s probably best for both parties at this point,” ex-Kings president Geoff Petrie, who drafted Cousins fifth overall out of Kentucky in 2010, told USA TODAY Sports via text message. “It’s a very layered landscape which won’t play out for a while. Bottom line: They both get to start over.”
Even those closest to Cousins are starting to see it that way.
Guard Garrett Temple was as close to Cousins as anyone on the Kings’ roster this season, yet the 30-year-old is more convinced by the day this is for the best.
For all of Cousins’ off-court issues this season — a New York nightclub incident, a blow-up with a local columnist, the middle fingers he gave to a Golden State Warriors fan — Temple pointed to a significant sign of progress that was wasted with the trade: Cousins was getting along with his coach, Dave Joerger.
“I think we were reaching him and letting him know what he needed to do to become a winner, to become a leader,” Temple said. “I don’t know if he had that before or what happened.
“But, like I said, all the different inconsistencies may have hurt that, but that’s the only thing where you look back and you say, ‘I think I could have been a part of him changing into the person, the leader, the franchise player that brings this team to the fourth seed or the third seed in the Western Conference.’
“But at the end of the day, on the GM side, (you’re) 61⁄ years 2 in, he’s putting up monster numbers — his numbers can’t get any better, so what’s the deal? You’re winning 25, 30 games, so something has to give.”