Let’s get one thing straight: DeMarcus Cousins wants to get away from George Karl, and the feeling is mutual.
Regardless of the refrain from Vlade Divac, reports that Cousins has asked for a trade have been around for almost a month now, and Adrian Wojnarowski doesn’t exactly tend to pull things out of thin air. This thing is about to get ugly fast, and with the NBA draft just a day away, it behooves the Sacramento Kings to figure out how they are going to solve a situation that’s quickly becoming untenable.
If the Kings want to avoid a sure catastrophe by pitting these two against one another in training camp, they have little choice but to fire Karl, or move DeMarcus Cousins.
Making this decision in a vacuum, I can’t imagine many owners would sign with Karl. But this is the Kings we’re talking about here. They’ve suffered a decade of losing and have had very little success with Cousins as a part of their roster. They’ve been paying multiple previously-fired coaches for a while now, and they hired a future hall-of-fame coach in what is almost certainly his last NBA stop. He wants to win immediately. They want to win immediately.
Cousins, on the other hand, can be moody and difficult to coach. While his talent level is certainly lofty, injuries and attitude may give Sacramento pause to commit to the big man long-term if their prize coaching hire doesn’t want him there.
If Sacramento makes the tough decision to trade DeMarcus Cousins, Tim Connelly’s call to the Kings’ front office should begin with just two words: “How much?”
With a roster riddled with players who at best, sulked, and at worst, quit under former head coach Brian Shaw, the Nuggets have made it clear this summer that they are open for business on some of the top talent on their roster. Much of that talent also happened to play its best under none other than George Karl.
How much of Denver’s 30-win roster from last season would you concede for a 24-year-old center who averaged 24 points and 12 rebounds a game last year? Oh, and did I mention that Denver’s new coaching hire Michael Malone is the only coach that Cousins has ever liked in the NBA?
Does George Karl want Ty Lawson? Send him over. Does he want Kenneth Faried? Send him too. Karl wants Wilson Chandler? Throw him in as well. We’ll take back Carl Landry’s bad contract if it makes them feel better, maybe even give them our first round pick if we can get Darren Collison out of it.
It may sound like a lot on the surface, but let’s be honest: the Nuggets are probably prepared to part with Lawson and Faried for much less than Cousins, and the Nuggets can afford to take a year to rebuild, since they could end up with up three (but more likely two) first round picks in 2016, plus the option to swap their own pick with that of the New York Knicks, which figures to be a fairly high as well.
The point is, the cost of uniting a star of Cousins’ caliber with a coach he clicks with is crucial; the fact that he doesn’t appear to be a big-market chaser (Cousins loves Sacramento) doesn’t hurt either. In all, this could be a case where one man’s egregious malcontent is another’s saving grace. George Karl could never get along with superstars, and now it finally stands to benefit the Nuggets.
While other teams may have more attractive assets in terms of draft picks, keep in mind that after a decade of losing, the Kings want to win now. Karl isn’t going to be coaching there much more than five years, and if a deal with Cousins does go down, you better believe he’ll be the one behind it.
The question is, how many of Karl’s former players will it take?
The Sacramento Kings are about to blow up their roster, and the Denver Nuggets just may have the players to land the biggest piece. When all has settled, let’s hope that Denver hasn’t left anything off the table.
By firing Karl after a 57-win season, the Denver Nuggets were saying they wanted to big or go home. Well, they don’t get any bigger than DeMarcus Cousins.
