The Saga of DeMarcus Cousins
- Thread starter joemama
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After three fouls in eight minutes, they pulled him for the rest of the half. Third quarter, he picks up another, and is back out after four minutes. He's costing them peanuts, and they got into first place in the west without playing him, so I think GS has every reason to be happy. Someone paying max and really needing him to carry the team might not feel so lucky.
Offensively he looks smooth and highly skilled as usual. 3 Pt shot looks silky even on the misses and he's going to get a ton of wide open looks on this team. Defensively he looks really bad and slow laterally but I suspect some of that will improve with conditioning and confidence to plant and turn hard on his legs. Definitely fouling too much partly from exuberance and partly from lack of feel for what is and what isn't a foul.
"Really bad" feels like an over-exaggeration. He was definitely slow laterally, but I don't know that he was significantly slower laterally than he was pre-injury. His rotations on switches weren't really clean, and Golden State kind of lucked out that the Clippers don't have anyone who can exploit that, without Lou Williams in the lineup. For the most part, though, I thought that his defense was solid, and his post defense was good-to-great. One definite good sign for Cousins and the Warriors is that, with the exception of maybe one foul, it didn't really look like any of the poor defensive plays he was involved in were due to bad decisions, at least not from my point of view. His defensive awareness looked solid, so many of the errors he made last night I would expect to be corrected as his conditioning improves.
And yeah, there was definitely a lot of "I'm back!", "I don't know what they're calling this year!?" and "I'm tired!" involved in his six fouls.
And yeah, there was definitely a lot of "I'm back!", "I don't know what they're calling this year!?" and "I'm tired!" involved in his six fouls.
