During Tuesday night’s 126-121 win over the Portland Trail Blazers, DeMarcus Cousins had one of the most DeMarcus Cousins games of all time. He poured in 55 points, snagged 13 rebounds, managed to get an ejection reversed and then ended the night by going on an anti-official rant before someone in charge wisely cut off his microphone. Over the course of a few hours, Cousins showed both why he was one of the best players in the league and why, despite that, the Kings need to strongly consider moving on from the talented but troubled big man.

It was a relatively ordinary game, box score excepted, until its closing minute when Cousins picked up his second technical foul of the night, and an automatic ejection, after spitting out his mouthpiece in the general direction of the Trail Blazers bench. The officials ended up rescinding the technical foul and the ejection after determining that the mouthpiece incident was accidental. The reversal wasn’t enough to prevent Cousins from calling them out immediately after the win.

PEAK BOOGIE: DeMarcus Cousins scores 54th point, spits mouthguard, gets ejected, sprints to locker room, gets un-ejected! (full sequence) pic.twitter.com/kNQ7TRQCOs — Ben Golliver (@BenGolliver) December 21, 2016

“It’s ridiculous. It’s obvious what’s being done here. It’s a nightly basis. I hope the world can see what’s really going on out here,” Cousins said in an exchange that was eventually cut short before he could get himself into further trouble.

they cut his mic!! pic.twitter.com/lqIbYMVERv — James Herbert (@outsidethenba) December 21, 2016

Further trouble, of course, is absolutely the last thing Cousins needs right now. Earlier in the day he was fined $50,000 by the Kings and forced to issue an apology for the profane tirade he directed towards Sacramento Bee reporter Andy Furillo a few days earlier. Furillo drew his ire when he attempted to ask Cousins questions about the nightclub altercation he and teammate Matt Barnes were involved in earlier in the month.



DeMarcus Cousins’s relationship with the local media in Sacramento summed up in two clips.

Cousins will have to answer more questions about what happened in New York’s Avenue Nightclub on 5 December. Both he and Barnes are subjects of a lawsuit issued by a couple who allege that Barnes assaulted her and that Cousins attacked her boyfriend when he attempted to intervene. This incident by itself would be enough to strain the relationship between the Kings and Cousins. That he has managed to make things even worse in its aftermath is downright troubling.



These, of course, are just the latest incidents for a player whose obvious skills are overshadowed by legitimate concerns about his attitude, maturity and game-to-game effort. While “coach-killer” is a label that gets thrown around far too often in the media, Cousins has earned that distinction. He’s already played for six head coaches since entering the league in 2010 and had a good relationship with exactly one of them: Mike Malone, who coached the team in 2013-14.

Under Malone, Cousins was having what was then the best season of his career, he even showed flashes of maturation. Unfortunately, Cousins got hurt and the Kings slumped in his absence which gave owner Vivek Ranadive an excuse to fire Malone in one of the most short-sighted moves in franchise history. Malone’s eventual full-time replacement was the terminally old school George Karl, an all-time great coach but the worst possible fit considering the volatile situation. As nearly everyone predicted when Karl was hired, he and Cousins almost immediately got into a power struggle that ended with Karl’s premature dismissal.

Not all of this is on Cousins. The Kings have been one of the most dysfunctional teams in US sports for the entirety of Cousins’ career. Not even an overdue change in ownership, from the absentee landlords that were the Maloofs to Ranadive’s technocratic buffoonery, was able to change the culture for the better. It’s hard to imagine Cousins being stuck in a worse environment for those crucial early years of development.



It certainly wasn’t a winning environment, that’s for certain. The last time the Kings made the playoffs was in 2006, four years before Cousins’ arrival. Even if Cousins were a Tim Duncan-like “perfect soldier”, and assuredly he is not and never will be, no amount of poise and leadership could have overcome his team’s inability to surround him with anything resembling a solid supporting cast. As of right now, Rudy Gay might end up being remembered as Cousins’s best teammate. That’s not a good thing.

Meanwhile, the Kings only have Cousins under contract until 2018. Unless they somehow manage to pull a Miami Heat and convince two Hall of Fame caliber players to join them, they won’t be much closer to championship contention than they are today. Theoretically, they could convince Cousins to sign an extension but that seems unlikely considering how untenable things have become for both parties. The wise move would be for Sacramento to finally move Cousins, and all his baggage, and start to rebuild again.

Since these are the Kings, however, there’s no reason to expect them to ever make the wise move. As much as it makes sense to move on from Cousins, right now it seems unlikely for several reasons. First of all, the Kings simply are not going to get fair value back for Cousins who, despite his off court issues, is averaging 29.3 points per game, good for fourth in the league, along with 10.8 rebounds. He very well could be the best big man in the NBA this season.

Meanwhile, even though the Kings’ record is a lowly 11-17, that’s good enough to put them just two wins behind the Denver Nuggets for the eighth seed in the Western Conference. The Kings are still very much alive in their quest for their first playoff appearance in a decade. Unless they fall out of the hunt completely, which would shock no one, it will be hard for them to sell their already skeptical fan base on trading away their only all-star caliber player, and effectively punting away their chances of the postseason, unless they get a haul in return.

And they won’t get a haul. Even though Cousins might be having a breakout season, his trade value has never been lower. Already there are reports that rival GMs are against bringing in Cousins at any price, believing that he’s too big of a risk from both a locker room perspective and a PR perspective. The general feeling is that he could help take a team to the next level but he could also completely destroy it from the inside. While Sacramento could surely find teams willing to take the gamble, they would most likely be trading pennies on the dollar.



So even though he is doing everything he can to wear out his welcome in Sacramento, it’s likely that Cousins and the Kings are stuck at least for the time being. Maybe they deserve each other.