DeMarcus Cousins just sort of watches a Steph Curry-to-Marreese Speights alley-oop
A handful of immediate-reaction thoughts sparked by DeMarcus Cousins straight-up standing still — not even moving a single muscle — to prevent Marreese Speights from catching and throwing down an alley-oop dunk off an inbounds pass from Stephen Curry during the third quarter of the Golden State Warriors’ blowout 121-96 win over the Sacramento Kings on Tuesday night:
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1. Did he just forget he was on defense and not offense?
2. It’s a good thing the collective bargaining agreement has that “no takebacks” provision on All-Star injury replacement selections.
3. That’s probably not quite the four-on-five defense that Vivek Ranadivé has in mind.
4. I’ll respectfully cede my time in this slot to Rob Mahoney of Sports Illustrated:
To call what Cousins did on that lob “falling asleep defensively” implies that one can deliberately will themselves to sleep in a wink.
— Rob Mahoney (@RobMahoney) February 4, 2015
There’s laziness, there’s inattention, and then there’s *that*.
— Rob Mahoney (@RobMahoney) February 4, 2015
5. Somewhere in the darkness, a beard gets something done whilst demanding Cousins be taken into custody for, I don’t know, treason? Forgery? Whatever, just take him away, all right?
OK, so, no, this was decidedly not the Sacramento center’s finest hour. And yes, it looks even worse when you recall Cousins standing similarly statuesque during a Kings offensive possession in the fourth quarter of a New Year’s Day win over the Minnesota Timberwolves:
It’s perhaps worth noting, though, that Boogie responded to this glaring blown assignment by scoring five straight points, feeding Rudy Gay for a dunk and setting the screen that sprung Darren Collison for a foul-line runner, sparking a late-third quarter run that briefly got the Kings back within hailing distance heading into the fourth quarter.
And that, with the Kings down 15 early in the fourth, after David Lee blocked Omri Casspi’s shot and the Warriors pushed the ball, Cousins raced back in transition for a chase-down block of a Leandro Barbosa layup attempt — one of Cousins’ four blocks on the night, to go with three steals, a game-high 26 points and 11 rebounds — only for Speights to pick up the loose ball and deposit the putback because nobody else on Sacramento backtracked to help. So it’s not like Cousins’ stasis was perpetual. (Plus, for real, he’s been better defensively this year!)
That said, Cousins did look somewhat disengaged at multiple junctures on Tuesday, for whatever reason — fatigue from wrestling with the likes of Speights, Andrew Bogut and Festus Ezeli all game, accumulated wear-and-tear from the Kings’ renewed commitment to playing uptempo after replacing Michael Malone with Tyrone Corbin (as Cousins recently put it, “With the whole pace thing, things are kind of wacko”) or maybe just having a garden-variety rough night at the office. Given the top-to-bottom talent disparity between the Kings, who have now dropped nine of their last 10 to plummet to 17-30, the fourth-worst record in the West, and the Warriors, who have bounced back from back-to-back losses with consecutive blowout wins to improve to a league-leading 38-8, occasional disengagement from your best player’s just won’t cut it.
Oh, well. Maybe Cousins and Kings fans can take some solace in knowing that Boogie’s far from the only player to get caught napping by the Warriors on an inbounds play this year. In fact, as this supercut from Half Court Hoops details, it’s actually kind of a specialty of Steve Kerr’s squad:
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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