Warriors eager to finally get Cousins on the court.
Cousins, coming off an Achilles injury, could be just what the doctor ordered
OAKLAND >> After months of ambiguity, we have a date.
Well, sort of.
According to ESPN and Yahoo reports, DeMarcus Cousins is targeting Jan. 18 for his Golden State Warriors debut.
Unless it’s the game before that ... or the game after that.
Warriors coach Steve Kerr wouldn’t confirm the exact date for Cousins’ debut following the team’s win over the Knicks on Tuesday — but he didn’t say that the reported date was wrong, either.
Regardless of which date it is (my bet is the 18th), Cousins’ return to the hardwood is nigh.
And he couldn’t arrive at a better time for the Warriors.
When Warriors general manager Bob Myers agreed to sign Cousins last summer, he admittedly didn’t take much time to factor in the team’s center depth chart or the bench shooting before making the decision.
That’s because when a player of Cousins’ talent level calls you and offers to play for a quarter of his perceived market value — a concept so bizarre Myers initially thought Cousins’ call was a prank — it’s natural to give a quick response.
You say yes.
But the truth remains that the addition of Cousins and his inability to play thanks to a ruptured Achilles tendon last January has created problems for the Warriors.
Not in the way some expected — Cousins, who developed a bad reputation during his stay in Sacramento, has been a model citizen and a valued teammate; you can’t get anyone on the Warriors to say a foul word about him — but rather with the butterfly effect of his surprising acquisition.
The Warriors sit at 27-14 at the halfway point of the season, a mark that, for most teams, would be considered a tremendous accomplishment, but for the Warriors could be classified as a disappointment.
Injuries have played a big role in that uninspiring record — Stephen Curry missed 11 straight games in November and Draymond Green has missed 14 this season — but two constants have been a lack of consistency at the center position and a lack of reliable scoring off the bench.
Had the Warriors not signed Cousins, they might have avoided such issues.
It was certainly easy to imagine better ways Myers could have used the Warriors’ midlevel exception over the last few months, with Cousins in street clothes at the end of the Warriors’ bench.
But Cousins will give the Warriors the first five All-Star lineup in modern NBA history and could — no, should — provide the antidote for both major issues when he finally hits the floor in the coming days.
Let’s start with the center issue:
At this point, the Warriors merely need a big body to play the position. Seemingly anyone will do.
As the Warriors see it, they currently have zero centers on their active roster. After Damian Jones — who at 7-foot and 245 pounds fit the bill as a true five — went down with a torn pectoral muscle on Dec. 1, the team has cobbled together minutes at the position.
The team’s current starting center, 6-9 Kevon Looney, is still viewed by Warriors coaches as a power forward who, before this season, was utilized almost exclusively as a defense-first, super-switching center against small and isolation-heavy opponents.
Green is being used as Looney’s backup, playing 15-plus minutes per game at the five (he played 19 minutes at center Tuesday) despite Kerr’s insistence at the beginning of the season that he would try to avoid playing him at the position in the regular season because of the wear and tear that comes with an undersized and constantly banged-up forward playing it.
Behind those two is Jordan Bell, who has played sporadic minutes, at best, this season, as Kerr and his staff simply don’t trust him to be sound on the defensive end.
Three forwards — well, really two — being shifted up to center. That’s it.
Some nights, that isn’t a problem. The NBA is getting smaller and smaller these days, after all.
But Tuesday night against the lowly Knicks, the Warriors’ lack of a true center was glaring. Knicks reserve center Enes Kanter pulled down six offensive rebounds — and 16 overall rebounds — in 25 minutes in the Warriors’ 27-point win. Kanter’s game didn’t have a bearing on the outcome, but that type of performance has played a big role in games against Oklahoma City, Portland, Denver, and even the Lakers — remember when Ivica Zubac looked like Patrick Ewing on Christmas? — to name a few.
Pardon the terrible pun, but the center position is arguably the team’s Achilles heel.
But if Cousins, who at 6-11 and 280 pounds is absolutely a center, can be 75 percent of his old self, he should eliminate that glaring problem.
(The team’s biggest issue — apathy — can also be tied to Cousins, in a way. There hasn’t been much incentive for the Warriors to establish championship-caliber habits in recent months, as Cousins will dramatically change the dynamic of the team when he takes to the floor, theoretically wiping out any progress the team would have made, in the process.)
Golden State coaches still don’t know exactly how they will deploy Cousins upon his return. The expectation is that he will eventually start, but he could begin his tenure on the bench.
But whether Cousins is starting or coming in as a reserve, he should see significant minutes with the Warriors’ “second unit,” hopefully solving another big Golden State problem.
The last two years the Warriors ran the second unit through big man David West. Prior to that, guard-in-a-center’s-body Mo Speights seemed to be the offensive epicenter of the bench unit.
But this year, no one has been able to hold down the role. Shaun Livingston has taken a step back in his 14th NBA season; Andre Iguodala’s skills were never meant for the role; the team’s best bench player, Jonas Jerebko, is more of an ancillary player; and Quinn Cook has been too inconsistent.
The Warriors tried to make Klay Thompson the offensive focal point of the second unit (which plays at the beginning of the second quarter), but that didn’t work. Kerr is currently trying Curry in the role — the two-time MVP has expressed his displeasure with his new rotation.
Cousins — being both a big man and an offensive dynamo — would certainly lend himself to the role.
And while the Warriors want to make sure that Cousins develops a rapport with the four other All-Stars, it might be more important to the Warriors for him to establish himself as the offensive fulcrum of the second unit and lift it up to a breakeven point for the first time all season.
This, of course, is a lot of responsibility to place on a player coming off an injury that would have been considered careerending a little more than a decade ago, but that’s the bargain the Warriors cut when they signed the five-time All-Star.
Right or wrong, they went allin on Cousins this summer.
And in the not-too-distant future, we’re going to find out if Cousins can make good on the Warriors’ big bet.
This is a truly grand experiment — fascinating to the core — and make no mistake about it, an NBA title will likely be determined by its outcome.