Sunday night, as the NBA All-Star Game wound down in the Big Easy, the Kings and New Orleans Pelicans agreed to a trade that will send Cousins to New Orleans (along with swingman Omri Casspi) in exchange for rookie guard Buddy Hield, Tyreke Evans’s expiring contract and a first- and second-round pick in this year’s NBA draft. Just looking at Cousins’s resume — a three-time all-star, a two-time all-NBA player and a two-time gold medal winner with Team USA (at the 2014 World Cup and in the 2016 Summer Olympics) — would make it seem like the trade is a no-brainer for New Orleans, and would lead many to question what in the hell the Kings were doing.

Polling the NBA Sunday night and into the early hours of Monday morning, however, led to no such assessments. Instead, the prevailing wisdom was that this was the best the Kings were going to do for Cousins. And once Vivek Ranadive, the team’s famously fickle owner, was willing to move Cousins in a trade, there was no reason for the front office to give him time to reconsider that position.

Now, after both the Kings and Cousins have painted the other as the bad guy in their six-plus year relationship, the time has come to see who was right. With Cousins headed to New Orleans to team with fellow all-star Anthony Davis and starting point guard Jrue Holiday, and Sacramento finally committed to a long-term rebuilding plan, both sides will get to prove it was the other that ruined this situation.

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For Sacramento, it’s a trade that’s equal parts stunning and predictable. When the new collective bargaining agreement was announced several weeks ago, the Designated Player Exception — which allowed a player like Cousins, if he met certain criteria, to be paid far more by his current team than if he left for another — was supposed to be a weapon for small-market teams like the Kings to keep a talent like this one under team control for years to come.

Instead, the Kings looked at Thursday as a deadline on multiple fronts. If Cousins was still on the team Thursday at 12:01 p.m. local time, Sacramento would have had no choice but to give him the massive contract extension on July 1, one that would give him over $200 million over five years — far more than any other team could give him.

But it’s clear Sacramento decided that simply wasn’t an investment it could make. And once Ranadive finally began to waver on his affection for Cousins, the Kings engaged in teams around the league on deals. Multiple people with knowledge of the situation made it clear that talks with the Boston Celtics, Los Angeles Lakers and Orlando Magic all sputtered as all three were hesitant to give anything of significant value in exchange for a player with Cousins’s combination of gifts and flaws.

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So now the Kings are essentially betting on themselves. They think Hield will be a good player, but are under no illusions they’ve just acquired an all-star in the making. But with the addition of first- and second-round picks they received from the Pelicans, the Kings will have a chance to restock their roster with young talent and start fresh with a good coach in Dave Joerger.

Given that the Kings have drafted Jimmer Fredette, Thomas Robinson, Ben McLemore, Nik Stauskas, Willie Cauley-Stein and Giorgios Papagiannis since taking Cousins in 2010, it’s up to them to prove they can actually begin to draft some quality players to make that plan work.

The Kings will also be flush with cap space — something they could potentially use to take on bad contracts for more picks and assets, or go splurge on more mediocre players who will only come there is they are overpaid.

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For Cousins, this is pretty straightforward. After years of being stuck on an island in Sacramento, he was given to New Orleans for peanuts. Taking a swing on a talent like Cousins — and not having any obligations past this year for doing so — is a no-brainer for the Pelicans, who play in an undesirable market, with limited financial flexibility and the potential to lose Holiday as an unrestricted free agent this summer.

The question, though, is whether Cousins will justify that investment. Will he be willing to play center next to Davis? Will he continue to be a massive liability defensively, as he has been for much of this season for the Kings? Will he be able to coexist with other ball-dominant players like Holiday and Davis?

If anything, this trade should be a wake-up call for Cousins. A player of his stature, in this situation, shouldn’t be available for pennies on the dollar. But he was — and that’s as much because of him as the Kings.

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It’s up to Cousins to prove that was a mistake. Only he can stop racking up technical fouls at a ridiculous rate (and it should be noted, if he gets one more he’ll be suspended for a second time this season, and will get an additional one-game suspension for every two technicals after that). Only he can focus defensively. Only he can prove he’s a team player, and not the pain in the neck many around the league view him to be, which is why this trade happened in the first place.