What if these 4 teams hadn't passed on drafting DeMarcus Cousins?
There is undoubtedly no shortage of candidates for the Most DeMarcus Cousins Game ever - few players in NBA history have ever been more themselves than DMC - but it's hard to believe many of them would be better suited for the role than this week's Sacramento Kings-Philadelphia 76ers game. Playing a Philly team without star center Joel Embiid, Cousins was unstoppable - amassing an absurd 46 points on just 16 shots - and nearly fended off the surging Sixers single-handedly. But he fouled out with his team down three, all but sealing a miserable Sacramento loss that made for a two-game swing in the all-important #Pickswap standings, and killed whatever momentum the Kings had built off of the impressive road wins in Cleveland and Charlotte.
After Boogie nights like that, I tend to think back to the 2010 NBA Draft at Madison Square Garden, and one guy in the press room who insisted that the best player in the class - the only player that truly mattered - was Cousins, and that every team who passed on him would rue the day they let him slip through their fingers. It was a prediction that couldn't have been more right, or more wrong. Cousins, taken fifth in the draft, is today almost certainly the most talented, productive player to come from that '10 class - not even former Kentucky teammate John Wall, taken first overall, is such a marvel. But after witnessing the seven years of drama, chaos, and losing that's engulfed the Kings in the seven years since DMC's drafting, would any general manager say they really regret missing out on the privilege?
Of course, that question goes back to the core chicken-or-egg question surrounding Cousins - is the Kings' inability to build a team around him the reason Cousins can't win, or is Cousins' inability to win the reason the Kings can't build a team around him? - which ESPN just spent several thousand words trying to answer before ultimately concluding: shrug emoji. But what if he'd never been on the Kings in the first place? Would he be in a better place right now if one of the four teams that passed on him had selected him instead?
It's a question that can obviously never be answered with any degree of certainty. But let's take a look back at the teams from that big board seven Junes ago and see if we can make some educated guesses about where the Cousins path would've led them.
1. Washington Wizards
How long ago was 2010, you ask? Long enough ago that when John Wall was drafted with the No. 1 pick that summer, the conversation turned to if he could potentially thrive in a three-guard lineup with a post-firearm problem Gilbert Arenas and a semester-abroad Kirk Hinrich. Also on the roster at that point in time: JaVale McGee, Nick Young, Jordan Crawford, and Andray Blatche. It took Washington three seasons to clear out the riff raff and sprinkle in the right veterans around their franchise point guard before he could really begin to thrive, but it also took Wall being a professional, improving his game, and staying mostly drama-free in his early days.
Cousins in Washington? It's hard to believe it would've gone well for anyone - the construction of that early-'10s Wizards team was very Kings-esque, and it seems unlikely that he would've allowed for the same stability that Wall did once things started to turn around. Comparing the two situations should give DC fans a new sense of appreciation for just how much Wall's done there - there have been frustrations for the franchise over that span for sure, but they also won two playoff series, while Cousins has yet to even come close to playing in one in Sacramento.
2. Philadelphia 76ers
Certainly, an intriguing "what if." Could Cousins have been proto-Process in Philly? The team had a decent, if somewhat aimless, core in place by the time they jumped to No. 2 in the 2010 draft, with Andre Iguodala, Thaddeus Young, Lou Williams, Elton Brand, and graduating rookie point guard Jrue Holiday. What they needed was an offensive hub, but they opted to look for that player on the wing in Ohio State star Evan Turner, rather than going down low with Cousins. That obviously didn't work out - Turner had flashes of potential but ultimately frustrated in Philly, and even after the team made the playoffs two straight years and nearly made the NBA's most unearned conference finals push in 2011-12, they brought in Sam Hinkie to set up his unprecedented house-cleaning in 2013.
It's certainly interesting to consider how that core could've congealed around Cousins. The dealbreaker in that dream scenario would likely have been the presence of recently hired then-coach Doug Collins, an old-school coach who emphasized ball security and consistent defensive effort. Pairing him with Cousins would've made for the most combustible Philly duo since Allen Iverson and Larry Brown, and even Brown never had to coach AI as a rook: No way Collins lasts two years with DMC, and from there, maybe the coaching carousel begins turning. If you asked Sixers fans: Replay the last seven seasons with Cousins as a Liberty Baller or wait around another six years for Joel Embiid to finally get here? Ninety-nine percent of them would replay the entire Process in a heartbeat.
3. New Jersey Nets
The 12-70 Nets of a year before were in desperate need of a talent influx a couple seasons ahead of their move to Brooklyn - leading to an attempted free-agent splurge that set its sights on LeBron James and Dwyane Wade and ended up settling for Travis Outlaw and Johan Petro - and so they were willing to make a play for upside in the 2010 draft. But even the barren Nets deemed Cousins too much of a risk, and New Jersey instead opted for Georgia Tech big Derrick Favors. Putting DMC on the '10-'11 Nets would've been the purest exercise in building a team around the star center, since there would've been virtually nothing already in place at the time he got there - though given some of the Vivekian moves the team made in their pursuit of the playoffs after 2010, the movie might've played out similarly.
Of course, the real question might not be how would Cousins have done in New Jersey, but how would he have done in Utah? Before the trade deadline in 2011, Favors - in the midst of an encouraging but hardly overwhelming rookie season - was dealt to Salt Lake in a package for then-star point guard Deron Williams, and perhaps if he's taken No. 3 in 2010, that trade still goes down with Cousins in Favors' place. Tempting to place Cousins in a similarly isolated sports market with a tighter infrastructure than Sacramento's, though even that trade would've gone down at the peak of Utah's instability, having recently deposed longtime head coach Jerry Sloan and replaced him with Tyrone Corbin. And we've seen how well Cousins and Corbin have worked together.
4. Minnesota Timberwolves
Perhaps the most intriguing of these landing spots: If the Timberwolves took Cousins instead of Wesley Johnson, could they have built a winner around Kevin Love before essentially being forced to trade him in 2014? A Love-Cousins frontcourt would certainly have the potential for dominance on at least one end of the ball, though defensively it might've been sketchy at best. Maybe with those two in tow and Ricky Rubio coming over a year later, the Timberwolves have enough of a core to weather the draft misfirings on Jonny Flynn and Derrick Williams, and they actually make the playoffs in 2012-13. Or maybe they give up 120 points a night, Wolves fans turn on Cousins like they did on Al Jefferson, and Rick Adelman retires a couple years earlier.
Unfortunately, as is so frequently the case at the top of the draft, the common thread among the teams picking in the top five in 2010 was that all of their franchises were in near or complete disarray - which is a large part of why, seven years later, four of them are back in the lottery, and two of those never escaped in the first place. "If only he'd fallen to the right team," we often bemoan about high-ceilinged prospects whose teams can't seem to put them in a place to win. But the sad truth about our draft system is that most of the time, there's little but wrong teams for the best players to end up with. Would Cousins have had an easier getting out of the gutter with one of these other four teams than in Sacramento? Maybe, but he'd still have had to do a whole lot of the pulling himself.