Did the Kings Make a Mistake Taking DeMarcus Cousins?
Tuesday, February 15th, 2011A friend of mine constantly says, “You are who you are.”
And right now, the Sacramento Kings are a baaaaad basketball team. So, when a top two pick slipped to them at five, they had no choice but to take a gamble on him. Has it paid off? Too early to tell.
The Kings knew Cousins had character issues - actually more like maturity issues. Basically, he has the mind of a young boy and the body of a monster. The Kings have obviously been patient with him. The latest incident - one which got him banned from the team’s charter for getting into an argument (I’m not close enough to the situation to know the proper adjective to place before “argument”) - is the third disciplinary type action this season taken by the club toward their prodigy.
What precipitated his loss of wings was not that he was upset (went ballistic?) that the final play didn’t go through him, it was the manner in which he expressed himself - to his teammate. The move by Kings’ president Geoff Petrie is simply a teaching point, i.e. just as DeMarcus needs to learn to improve his low post moves, he needs to learn how to act like a professional - to be a better teammate.
There’s no debate Cousins is a legit NBA talent; what the Kings are betting on is that his competitiveness (a good trait) will be channeled in the proper direction. He needs to act in such a way that he gains the trust of the other players so that he eventually will be the first option. And when things go awry, he needs to understand that, although he wants to be the guy who comes through for his club, that things don’t always go as planned. That’s when you come together as a team and figure out why it didn’t work and how you can make sure it does the next time.
But as far as his reaction this time, while it’s unacceptable behavior, it’s not like he got into a fight over a card game. As Lefty Driesell was fond of saying:
“I like a player with a little son of a bitch in him.”