The Official 2013-14 Sacramento Kings thread!

[IronFist]

The Ballad of Boogie
DeMarcus Cousins is having a great season — but will he ever be a great leader?

BY JONATHAN ABRAMS ON JANUARY 23, 2014
Whenever they were at the grocery store, Monique Cousins would train one eye on her shopping cart and the other on her son, DeMarcus. By the time he hit adolescence he was more than tall — his arms and legs were always in a tangle, and his knees and elbows jutted out everywhere. At the store, DeMarcus towered over aisles and shoppers alike. Sometimes he’d carelessly bump into them while casting his gaze above their heads. Sometimes they got angry with the giant, wandering boy.

“There would always have to be [an adult] around so that you could make that individual understand,” Monique Cousins said. “You would always have to tell them his age; then they would calm down. Because they would just look at [his] body. If you would just look at the face and listen to him talk, you’d know.”

Everyone saw a man. But DeMarcus Cousins was just a child.

♦♦♦

The first time Cousins practiced for Otis Hughley, his coach at Alabama’s LeFlore Magnet High School, he pawed a rebound, dribbled the length of the floor, and whipped a behind-the-back pass to a cutting teammate. Hughley ended practice right then and there.

“I needed time to process what he just did,” Hughley said. “I don’t even think he knew.”

No one has ever questioned Cousins’s talent. It’s his attitude — a unique brand of petulance that both makes him go and holds him back — that has defined his basketball life.

Over time, Cousins’s lankiness turned into muscle. His awkwardness became power. He had the size of a man, if not the demeanor. When the Sacramento Kings drafted Cousins in 2010 after his freshman year at Kentucky, pairing him with Tyreke Evans, he was tapped to lead the organization into a new era of prosperity. His struggle is not uncommon in an era of one-and-done players. How do you become The Man if you’re still learning how to be a man?

When DeMarcus Cousins entered the league, he demeaned coaches, fought with teammates, and argued with referees. He was a tyrant. But he inflicted the most damage on himself. Keith Smart, his former coach in Sacramento, once heard famed Georgetown coach John Thompson vouch for Cousins, in a manner of speaking. “It’s easier to calm down a fool than resurrect a dead man,” Smart recalled Thompson saying. Now more than ever, Cousins needs calming. He stands out in a league largely devoid of traditional big men, at nearly 7 feet tall and weighing 270 pounds, yet he moves like a guard, with a deft touch around the basket.

“I don’t know if he understands how talented he is,” said Isaiah Thomas, Sacramento’s point guard.

Four years into a tumultuous career, he may finally understand what he’s supposed to be. His definition of leadership would have made John Wooden beam.

“Leadership is being the best example you can be for your teammates,” Cousins said before a recent game. “The guy that everybody can depend on on a nightly basis. A leader is a guy [whose] energy and aura can control the people around you. It’s not about your image. It’s about going out every night and leading a group of guys by example and not just necessarily speaking.”

“To be honest, I’ve been a leader for a while now,” he continued. “It’s just I haven’t led in the best way possible. That’s what I want to learn. I’m a guy that a lot of people look up to. I haven’t always handled situations the right way. That’s why I have to continue to grow and be a better player, a better leader.”

Cousins received a technical foul in his next game against the Utah Jazz. He was charged with another one the following night in Phoenix, upping his league-high total to 10. People inside the Kings organization speak of a new DeMarcus Cousins, one who is drastically more mature than the 19-year-old kid who entered the league. Still, the product is not finished.

“At this point it resides in him,” said Geoff Petrie, the former Kings general manager who drafted Cousins. “It really does. He’s going to determine what his career is. Obviously, he’s going to play for a long time and make a lot of money, all those peripheral things. But what it actually stands for is up to him.”

 

[IronFist]

more.....

Gary Williams, an assistant coach with the AAU’s Birmingham Storm, was always on the lookout for talent. When Williams first spotted Cousins, he figured he had to be nearing high school graduation. He was a seventh-grader. Williams told Cousins about the Storm, but the boy had always been reluctant about playing basketball. He was especially worried about the frequent travel an AAU team demanded. It was his mother who coaxed him into it.

Danny Pritchett kept waiting for the kid to stop growing. Pritchett, the Storm’s head coach, figured that Williams had exaggerated Cousins’s size. Maybe he was 6-foot-1 or 6-foot-2. “Oh my god,” Pritchett said to himself as he watched Cousins unfurl out of the car before his first practice. Just 12 years old, he stood about 6-foot-5. Cousins didn’t know much about the game then. But unlike most kids his size, he was coordinated. “That was when I knew I had something to work with,” Pritchett said.

Within two years, the recruiting website Rivals.com ranked Cousins as the country’s top ninth-grader before he entered E.B. Erwin High School in Center Point, Alabama. “It came pretty fast,” Cousins said. That ranking may as well have been pinned onto Cousins’s back next to his jersey number. Opponents played him aggressively, coming after him to prove their toughness. He had his front teeth dislodged on more than one occasion. “When people couldn’t compete with him, they would actually push him, hit him, knock him out the air,” Pritchett said. “The front teeth in his mouth are not real. They got elbowed out. So you’re telling a kid that’s maybe 15, 16 years old that this is normal, you’ve got to handle this. There were some growing pains to show him how to handle it.” Pritchett asked Cousins to respond by playing harder. “Grab 10 more rebounds,” he suggested. “Dunk five more times. That’s how you get back at them.”

The competition wasn’t limited to the court. Other summer league coaches tried poaching Cousins from Pritchett on nearly a daily basis. The Bad News Bears, Monique Cousins playfully called the Storm. They lacked the resources of other AAU teams. Monique drove from tournament to tournament, sometimes pulling up at home from a weekend trip just in time for DeMarcus to run inside and get dressed for school.

Other teams offered free flights, sneakers, and tickets to professional games. “Anything that a child his age would like to do,” Monique Cousins said.

DeMarcus Cousins noticed how those recruiters changed their tune when he told them he was sticking with Pritchett and the Storm. “There’s people that smile in your face, but they’ve got a different agenda,” Pritchett said. “They’re not who they [say they] are.

“If DeMarcus loves you, he’s going to love you,” Pritchett continued. “If he’s upset about something, you’re going to see it. But that don’t mean he don’t love you. And if you got a question that needs to be asked, don’t ask him if you don’t want to hear the answer. He’ll tell you exactly what it is.”

Jaleel Cousins said his older brother allows few people into his life. “If he senses you’re fake and you’re going to try and use him, he’s going to let you know,” Jaleel said. “He’s not going to have a bunch of fake people around him.”

This mentality made for clear lines in life and on the basketball court. The opposition was the opposition. At Erwin, Cousins joined a veteran team. “He was an integral part of the team, but he wasn’t the captain,” said Van Phillips, the school’s principal. “He respected the senior leadership.”

Still, he had his problems. The school suspended Cousins for the second half of his sophomore season following a physical altercation with a bus driver. The incident trailed Cousins throughout his high school career. He maintained that he was only defending himself. The next season, when Cousins briefly enrolled at Clay-Chalkville in Pinson, he was ruled ineligible by the Alabama High School Athletic Association, which determined that the school had improperly recruited Cousins and two other transfers.

Cousins then landed with Hughley at LeFlore. “I was much the same [way] as a player and adolescent,” Hughley said. “I knew him a million miles away.” Cousins wondered why his new coach held him to a higher standard. Other kids had criminal records. Why worry about him? “You’re not at the starting line with these folks,” Hughley would tell him. “The folks are looking at you, saying, I wish I had what you have.”

“If somebody wants to beat you with a stick, let them find their own,” he’d tell him. “Don’t give them a stick to beat you with. But at 15, 16 years old, you don’t understand that.”

Basketball became Cousins’s life, a constant routine of practice and games, with school and sleep filling in the gaps.

Cousins missed out on many of high school’s rites of passage. “He didn’t do a lot of things outside of basketball,” Hughley said. Cousins went to an all-star camp instead of prom. He practiced instead of attending his school’s football games. “He never really got to do the normal things other kids did, like dating,” Monique Cousins said. “He basically sacrificed everything to play ball.”

Cousins maintained his ranking as a top prospect, even after a heavily favored LeFlore lost to Birmingham’s Parker, 52-39, in the Alabama High School Athletic Association Class 5A semifinals in 2009. Eric Bledsoe, Cousins’s future Kentucky teammate, guided Parker with 17 points, nine rebounds, and five assists. Cousins missed 10 of his 12 shots and fouled out on a technical with less than four minutes remaining. “His frustration was a big part of the plan,” Maurice Ford, Parker’s coach, told the Birmingham News. “Get the big man frustrated.”

http://grantland.com/features/the-ballad-of-boogie/

 

[VegetasHairline]

*uppin*

We gotta get this thread going Kings brehs @2pac_Westside @Sonny Corinthos @KingsnBucs1987 @IronFist there are plenty of us here now.

That Ballad Of Boogie article on Grantland was fantastic.

 

[2pac_Westside]

*uppin*

We gotta get this thread going Kings brehs @2pac_Westside @Sonny Corinthos @KingsnBucs1987 @IronFist there are plenty of us here now.

That Ballad Of Boogie article on Grantland was fantastic.

Yep you right breh, i'm just torn right now for this season because I love watching the team win, but I know we need losses...I would hate to not have a top 12 pick and have to give it to Chicago

The trade deadline is less than 2 weeks away, you guys think we making any moves?

 

[VegetasHairline]

I agree with you, it'll suck to lose a top 12 pick in this draft. We can blame Geoff Petrie for that one.

As for trades, I don't know now. Marcus Thornton and Jason Thompson have both played MUCH better. May improve their value. I just see us making a small move, like moving Jimmer.

 

[2pac_Westside]

I agree with you, it'll suck to lose a top 12 pick in this draft. We can blame Geoff Petrie for that one.

As for trades, I don't know now. Marcus Thornton and Jason Thompson have both played MUCH better. May improve their value. I just see us making a small move, like moving Jimmer.

yea i'm perfectly fine with a small move..i would love to package jimmer and thornton

 

[IronFist]

yo wasnt somebody suppose to go to the allstar game? i think one of the players is suppose to be in the dunk contest (?)

 

[VegetasHairline]

yo wasnt somebody suppose to go to the allstar game? i think one of the players is suppose to be in the dunk contest (?)

Ben McLemore is in the dunk contest. DeMarcus Cousins has a possible chance of making the All Star Game if there's another injury replacement. Anthony Davis got Kobe's spot.

 

[IronFist]

Ben McLemore is in the dunk contest. DeMarcus Cousins has a possible chance of making the All Star Game if there's another injury replacement. Anthony Davis got Kobe's spot.

how the hell this happen?

 

[VegetasHairline]

Injury replacement. Anthony Davis deserves it as well. Game is also being played in New Orleans.

 

[IronFist]

Injury replacement. Anthony Davis deserves it as well. Game is also being played in New Orleans.

yeah i heard.

 

[Sonny Corinthos]

My Kings brehs

I tell y'all I want these Ws these dudes gotta get that positive feeling going into next year. We got our franchise big and we need to put the right pieces around him now rather than worry bout a draft with unprovens, regardless of the hype there isn't the next LBJ in this draft.


I'm looking forward to tonight's game hoping certain guys show out and Ainge wants to deal us Rondo...would love it if we got Rondo for a package of IT and our pick

 

[Sonny Corinthos]

Glad I didn't go to this game tonight


I really hope next season PDA focuses on bringing in defenders because these fools can't spell defense.

Boogie got lit up by Sullinger too

Just a bad game all around brehs

 

[VegetasHairline]

@Sonny Corinthos I'm starting to agree with you breh. We need to give up anyone but Boogie to get Rajon Rondo. He'd make a huge difference. Him and Boogie would be

 

[Sonny Corinthos]

@Sonny Corinthos I'm starting to agree with you breh. We need to give up anyone but Boogie to get Rajon Rondo. He'd make a huge difference. Him and Boogie would be

Thank you breh


Rondo would do wonders for Maclemore


I still think our pick and pieces gets it done....I know we'd have to take back Wallace contract too