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Back to business as usual: the highlights are flying every which way, the Knicks are catching hell, and the NBA has a high-profile trade demand. Enough with salary cap esoterica and players leveraging their talent against the entire known universe.

According to reports, DeMarcus Cousins, the Sacramento Kings big man who had a reputation for foul moods and outbursts as a high school player, has extended the ultimate middle finger to the team that drafted him in 2010. Cousins is now like Derrick Coleman all over again, even if Cousins’ style of play is more like a shapely, ambitious Zach Randolph. Coleman was a failure; Randolph turned his career around. For now, Cousins is that malcontent with nothing much to hold up in his defense. Unwittingly, he has walked right into one of the most familiar, and for some comforting, tropes that the NBA has to offer.

Yet even trade demands by headcase players on dysfunctional teams aren’t what they used to be. Cousins’s demand may be best understood in air quotes. Trade demands, at least those expected to amount to anything, are highly strategic moves, with vetted destinations in mind. They have gotten more sophisticated, and less trashy, over the years, to the point where Chris Paul seems to have barely taken a public relations hit for his acceleration of the free agency process. This is the new power balance of the NBA, the player who can’t be bound by salary or contract specs.

Blurting out this demand in the coach’s office, as Cousins supposedly did, is an unformed gesture of frustration, petulance, and defiance. Cousins simply doesn’t have the leverage to force a trade; he’s still under a rookie deal, meaning the Kings would have to take on junk to get back anything of value. Trade demands have pulled off a weird kind of upward mobility. It’s not really a trade demand unless the prospects are real and rational. The impulsive, angry demand is a thing of the past. DeMarcus Cousins is an overgrown kid playing dress-up, wishing he had Dwight Howard’s clout and business pull.

Or maybe this kind of trade demand—now rendered moot by the changing landscape of player-guided transactions—is the equivalent of a child telling his parent "I hate you" or "I wish you were dead". That head coach Paul Westphal took this as an official declaration makes him look as silly and impetuous as Cousins. Indeed, his written statement to the press after telling Cousins to stay home from that night’s game against New Orleans reads like a case for treating Cousins’s demand as serious, an admission that proving so would be an uphill battle. Westphal outlines his view of quality team citizenship, then indicts Cousins for violating it on multiple counts. Ergo, Cousins has demanded a trade, as if by implication.

Subsequent reporting clarified that Cousins did in fact utter the magic words (Cousins denies this), but since when was such a major career move a "gotcha" event to be pinned on the player making the demand? It’s like Westphal is gloating over Cousins having asked to be traded, since it gives him grounds to insist that he should be traded. There are no basketball reasons for the Kings to make this move. Westphal is certainly more disposable than Cousins. If he is attempting to force Sacramento’s hand, he’s either resigned to his fate or outright delusional.