National Basketball Association

The DeMarcus Cousins extension may be bad news for the NBA

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 9:51 p.m. ET

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Fansided, Jared Dubin/Fansided

Going back years now, there have been near-constant rumors that the Sacramento Kings will trade DeMarcus Cousins. The Kings have been a laughingstock for years and Cousins is a star they have no chance to keep when he hits unrestricted free agency, the rationale goes.

Maybe the Boston Celtics will land him. Maybe it’ll be the Los Angeles Lakers. Maybe it’ll be some mystery team. But the default assumption in and around the league for a good, long while has been that the marriage between Cousins and the Kings will not outlast the four-year extension he signed back in 2013.

A Tuesday evening report from CSN California’s James Ham, though, painted a much different picture of the future for both Cousins and the Kings.

Following the Kings’ 100-94 win over the Detroit Pistons later that night, Cousins was asked by the assembled media in Sacramento about the report that he’d likely be sticking around. Cousins responded by asking the media if they wanted him to stay in Sacramento — because of course he did — but he also let on that he has no plans to be anywhere else. “I love Sacramento,” Cousins said. “This is where I want to be.”

It was a not-all-that-shocking response to a what could only be described as a very shocking report, given the intense speculation surrounding Cousins over the last few years and the fact that the Kings have shown no real signs of being able to build a contender around him, or even a functional team for that matter. Star players almost never come right out and say they want to leave their current team, after all; they push for a new destination through back-channels. Viewed in light of the changes made in the recent Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations, maybe the report isn’t actually that shocking.

(Though one couldn’t help but wonder if we’d still be hearing this talk if this were a typical race for the Western Conference’s 8-seed. The Kings are 16-22 and somehow only a half-game out of a playoff spot. In a typical year, they’d likely six or seven games out by now and nobody would talking about how they’re surprisingly competent playoff contenders. They’d be the same old Kings, which, really, they kind of are.)

The newly-created Designated Player Extension allows teams to offer in-their-prime homegrown stars so much more money than anyone else can — the Kings can offer Cousins about $80 million more than any other team — that the desire to be elsewhere, immediately, would have to be almost impossibly strong in order for it to overwhelm the desire to jump on that cash.

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