If the Kings end up with essentially the 2016 #6, the 2017 #8 pick and a second rounder, I wonder how far off that is from the proper haul? Kevin Love might be an example off the top of my head. He was an All-star player in his prime who had not made it to the playoffs and was traded for a #1. Not saying Love is as good as Cuz but he also had less baggage. What do we think the Kings should have gotten in return? One more 1st? Legitimate question.
Two firsts and a recent lotto pick on a rookie deal seems fair for a top 5 player which Cousins has been this year. We've been discussing it all season and that seems to be the consensus. Most people would have been happy with Jaylen Brown and Brooklyn's next two lotto picks. Vlade probably could have gotten something like that if he opened up the bidding league-wide but it sounds like he was targeting either Ingram or Hield and wasn't considering other offers so that obviously eliminated any chance of a bidding war getting us more value. Waiting until after the lottery may have resulted in a better trade or it may have resulted in teams getting cold-feet about giving up 4 years of an elite prospect and a future pick for 1 guaranteed year of DeMarcus. It's hard to say really. It could have been worse though! At least he wasn't traded to the GD Lakers!
If we end up with an additional top 10 pick this year, a good prospect at the top of the second round, and Buddy Hield becomes a solid starting SG it doesn't look like a bad package deal in the end. And you have to figure that tanking the rest of the season to keep our top-10 protected pick by trading DeMarcus in February was a consideration as well. We got blind-sided with that trade after months of assurances that DeMarcus was here for the long haul, but as time has passed and rational analysis starts to overtake raw emotion again it's looking like a better decision than it seemed like at the time. The top 3 protection on the New Orleans pick
really sucks though and our inability to secure a future pick to mitigate the risk isn't great either. But we were really up against a wall there. There just weren't enough bullets left in the gun to rebuild around DeMarcus. Now our timeline has been extended and expectations lowered and we actually have some young assets to work with.
The only thing that really sucks about it for me is that DeMarcus was as loyal as any NBA player is ever going to be to our team and our city and he was rewarded with a local paper and play-by-play man that bad-mouthed him any chance they could get and a GM/owner who talked up loyalty and family and then jettisoned him without so much as a friendly handshake and a "thanks for your services". The people who write these storylines are going to say that DeMarcus failed Sacramento and I really don't see any angle where that's remotely true. Winning with DeMarcus is the only thing that would have shut them up so it feels to me like the bad guys were rewarded for their pettiness, but life often doesn't turn out the way we would like. There's still a chance for him to forge his own happy ending elsewhere and for us to do the same with a new group of faces here.