They don’t make players like DeMarcus Cousins anymore. Mountain-sized centers are supposed to be a dying breed as the game speeds out and spreads up, but Cousins is a rare and loud exception. And after four-plus professional years honing his immense raw talent and figuring out the best ways to throw his 270 pounds around, he’s now as liable to outwit opponents as he is to outmuscle them. Even in a cutthroat Western Conference, Boogie stands out as an indisputable star.
Yet, somehow, he was left off the All-Star team by fans and coaches. It wasn’t until a day later, when commissioner Adam Silver selected him as Kobe Bryant’s injury replacement, that Boogie received the first All-Star bid of his career.
Cousins is a superstar. Most numbers you can throw out there confirm it. So why isn't he recognized as such?
For one, watching Cousins play is often an ugly experience. The effortless cool that most superstars exude on the court isn’t there with Cousins. Where players like Stephen Curry or Kevin Durant are inscrutable and placid, Cousins is a bleeding heart. People like their sports heroes to be logical and easy. Cousins is not easy. Sure, he has a calm disposition off the court, but when he’s playing, it’s unfiltered emotion all the time.
Any foul call on Cousins was at one time met with a yelp of frustration and a comically wide-eyed look of shock. When he barrels through defenders like they’re made of balsa wood and dunks through contact, he snarls and swaggers. He habitually breaks the fourth wall, and that probably makes people feel uncomfortable. But his emotional honesty can be refreshing. In a rapidly homogenizing NBA, stars don’t have rough edges. They attempt to adopt a truly neutral countenance so they can be all things to all people, perfectly modular for endorsements, distraction-free blank slates. Cousins doesn’t play into this. He feels things and acts on his feelings, like a human person. That up-down cycle has led to some of the dissonance between the troubled DeMarcus Cousins many imagine and the unstoppable one who has a top-10 PER.
Of course, his team being the Sacramento Kings, he has had more occasion for the bad type of yelling. The Maloofs kept hiring lame-duck coaches who were either too harsh (Paul Westphal) or too cuddly (Keith Smart) and he never got a chance for even, coherent development. Losses piled up and he took his frustrations out on teammates and coaches. He even yelled at Spurs announcer Sean Elliott. Early-period Cousins was a singularly difficult player because his talent was so obvious, and yet he couldn’t figure out how to use it. He was this big, powerful vein of gold that nobody could mine. For some time, his career was always discussed conditionally: if he figured it out, when someone figured him out.
Cousins found that bad reputation hard to shake. No matter what he did, every action was filtered through the popularly held heuristic that he was a headcase. Positive signs from Cousins went ignored, but when he got mad, it was news. Confirmation bias is sticky like that. The negative noise fed his uneven form on the court, and it became cyclical. When he could avoid early fouls, get touches in the post and maintain a semi-cordial relationship with the officials, Cousins could score on anyone. But those particular stars rarely aligned before this season, and his frustration would grow.
In the NBA, sometimes it’s more valuable to be consistently good rather than sporadically great, and his inconsistency made many see a young Zach Randolph or even Derrick Coleman. The old version of Cousins could be unguardable but he could also foul his way off the court in minutes. This tendency toward the dramatic and the precociousness he had with the establishment made him an easy target. It was popularly theorized that he needed to be traded to another team to get in touch with his talents. Bill Simmons openly campaigned for such a move.
Simmons was the earliest prominent acolyte of the cult of Cousins, a group that has since swollen and taken over the basketball Internet. Supporters don’t appreciate Cousins in spite of his antics, but because of them. There’s a certain rebellious sensibility about Cousins that fans identify with. Unapologetic pure id is a lot more fun to root for than restraint and orthodoxy. That he doesn’t bend to anyone’s will only makes him more likeable, almost aspirational. Everyone loves a revolutionary.
For Kings fans, it was a more complex matter. Three years into his time with the organization, it was unclear if he would ever capitalize on his potential or if he would remain an unreliable near-star. Even some of the NBA’s most thick-skulled loyalist fans -- remember, the city sold out two decades of terrible basketball -- were buying into the idea that Cousins was a problem.
In the summer after taking over from the Maloof family, Vivek Ranadive’s new organization let former rookie of the year Tyreke Evans walk and then signed Cousins to a four-year deal worth $62 million. It was a bold and unequivocal sign of support, and the NBA community was wary of giving Cousins the keys to a franchise. That worry seems silly now.
Two years into it, that contract is one of the biggest value deals in the NBA. Cousins has turned into the best offensive post player in the league without sacrificing any of the fire that set him apart in the first place. It’s not as if Cousins changed who he was or how he played. He simply got better at it. He dispatches elite defenders, is unbothered by double teams and still verbalizes his dissent or joy at every turn. His season is all the more impressive considering he’s endured the shock firing of his first real NBA coach as well as a two-week absence because of a scary meningitis infection.
The shock-jock portions of the NBA vanguard that refused to accept him still don’t, but that opinion looks increasingly sillier every time Cousins has a great game. Cousins’ rep with officials has only marginally improved, although respect and the benefit of the doubt tend to follow an All-Star berth. Importantly, Cousins has moved on up through these tribulations, not around them. For all his struggles with perception, he never changed who he was.
What really makes Cousins special is how his neolithic, brute-force game is built on trickery and cunning. He assists a higher percentage of his team’s baskets than Marc Gasol and Joakim Noah, both lauded for their passing ability. Cousins is as liable to take a charge as he is to block a shot, making him a very confusing player to attack. The Kings, who are 19.8 points per 100 possessions worse with Cousins on the bench, rely on him to be their scorer, facilitator, defensive fulcrum and spiritual center, all at once. Without him, they are anchorless, drifting off toward oblivion without a clue on either side of the ball. When you gameplan for the Kings, you gameplan for Cousins. You wouldn’t expect this holistic dominance from an old-school bruiser like Cousins, but appreciating him is learning to expect surprises.
It’s telling that Cousins is the only All-Star not voted in by the fans who is representing a poor team. The odious mediocrity of the Kings serves as a foundation for the argument that Cousins is more numbers charlatan than legit superstar. But the game has no higher authority than Silver, who selected Cousins over Damian Lillard, a fringe MVP candidate and Adidas poster boy. If there is a mark of legitimacy, it’s Silver’s approval. The gatekeepers that decry Cousins for his heart-on-sleeve style are now officially on the wrong side of history.
It’s tempting to paint Cousins as knucklehead who fell in line, but the truth is that he was never that bad in the first place and his uncompromising nature has given him strength. Players tend to smooth out over time and fall into the rhythm of NBA life. Cousins defies that pattern. He bristles at every blown call, adopts a properly celebratory mug when he jams it on a would-be shot blocker, and doesn’t hold back on the court. Many are uncomfortable with Cousins steadfast openness, but that’s who he is and it’s made him an All-Star.
Patrick Redford is a contributor to VICE Sports, Deadspin, and The Classical. Bug him on Twitter @patrickredford.
