damecurry wrote:As has happened in the recent past you seem to be taking the most extreme aspects of some of the things I said and vastly exaggerating them to create a straw-man argument I was never making. I'm not saying cousins is trash and doesn't help his team win at all, I'm saying compared to the huge stats he puts up and any other player that's discussed as a top 5-10 player he does not contribute to winning at nearly the same level.
Right, and I turned around and showed you examples of situations where GOAT-level talents weren't able to do very much with their teams. Now you look at a guy such as Cousins, who isn't supported at that level of play, and it's clear that he shouldn't be expected to do a lot more. You've created this position where you don't want to call Cousins a top 5 or top 10 player in the league, which isn't itself a problem, but the arguments you have advanced don't prove your point. There is a fairly wide range of team circumstances and what-not which go into these things. Cousins' Kings can't play defense to save their lives, and that makes a pretty big difference. The BEST scorers in league history tend not to be able to raise their teams past a given threshold of team offensive efficacy when they don't have any meaningful help, so we have a general idea of what we can expect from his level of play... and he's basically doing it. When he's been healthy, the Kings have been considerably more effective than without. As expected from a player who produces a given level of impact.
Are there some guys who are going nuts based on what he was doing in January, and that alone? Sure, that happened. It was a little frustrating, but not out of sorts with a lot of the nonsense we see from any fanbase, most especially one waiting for that moment when their guy turns the corner. The point is, you picked a moment after a loss that had everything to do with the entire team EXCEPT Cousins to come and renew this discussion by ragging on Cousins for not being able to win more without any real regard for the roster context he experiences. You could put most stars you could think of on this team and it wouldn't work out too well for them.
damecurry wrote:Um, yes. that's kinda how that works. AD only took his third year in the league to take his team to 45 wins and the playoffs.
Yes, Anthony Davis did a wonderful job on offense for the Pels last year. He also had a better defensive cast, and a decent amount of help on O. The Pels were the 4th-best team in the league last season in terms of team 3P% and both Ajinca and Asik were fine offensive rebounders, which also helped. Tyreke Evans, a half season from Jrue Holiday, the stretch value of Ryan Anderson, I mean he wasn't without tools. It's also very much a strong position to hold that the Brow in 2015 was a better player than Cousins, whose main claim otherwise outside of this January has been isolation ability.
That said, it's also true that Davis wasn't put into the kind of position Cousins was, where he had to do everything on-ball while shouldering an ATG level of shot creation and volume. He had the guard play which permitted him to do his thing. You'll notice that Davis hasn't looked so otherworldly now that his coach has him wasting his time beyond the arc, isolating from the perimeter a lot more and generally not getting as much of his offense from off-ball action enabled by his guards, yes?
Funny, that.
Of course, over the 14 games he's played in 2016, he's looking a lot better, so we'll see where that goes, but again, he struggled for a time trying to do what Cousins does. The results were different when his coach changed his style and when his guards weren't there for him to the same extent. Stuff like that does actually matter.
Cousins has had twice as long to do the same and has never even gotten close. Did the pels really have a substantially better roster outside of AD last year than the Kings do this year? They look pretty identical in terms of talent to me.
They did not, and they aren't identical, no. The Pels roster was definitely a superior set. Meantime, with respect to your question about Monty Williams, no, I don't think he's a stunning savant of a coach. He is, in fact, making the SAME mistake that Karl is making with Cousins as far as all of this 3pt business is concerned.
If the Kings were in the playoff picture in the weak west this year I wouldn't be making this argument,
Right, but that's daft. The Kings had 3 coaches last season, getting rid of the best coach they've had since Adelman. Cousins, Gay and Collison were all injured. They were 29-53, but they were 23-36 WITH Cousins, which of course means they were 6-17 without him. There it is in a nut shell. They were brutal without him, they had injuries all throughout, they had half a season of a PG and while they had a quality season from Rudy Gay on offense, they didn't get much else from anyplace else on the roster. Particularly last year, the West was brutal. When you look at a team like the Pels, which managed to overcome the half-season from Jrue by having meatier seasons from Evans and Gordon coupled with the frontcourt help which Davis enjoyed.
If he was really a top 5 player, a "superstar" there is no question that this team should be substantially better than the blazers are now, but they're not cause he's not.
How?
Yeah, if he were a better offensive player under the exact same conditions as in which he presently labors, that would help this team. Wouldn't much help their atrocious, team-killing defense, though, and it behooves one to mention that Cousins is shouldering a HUGE offensive load. 20.6 FGA/g (21.6 PER36) at 35.6% USG.
Let me frame that for you. 35.6% USG would be the 11th-highest single-season usage recorded by an NBA player since we had the data to estimate it. Melo, Kobe, AI, MJ, Wade and Westbrook are the guys making up most of that list. Jermaine O'neal sneaks in there with his 04-05 season, but that was a half-season (44 GP, 41 GS) at 19.4 FGA/g (20.1 PER36) which reps higher because the Pacers were still a-grindin'. Cousins is shouldering a fairly intense, ATG-level burden, and it's pretty well-known at this point that past a general threshold, usage correlates with efficiency inversely.
This is what the Kings are asking of him. In order to win, they need him to shoot as frequently as a superstar guard, which hasn't traditionally been reasonable to ask of anyone but an ATG big... which no one has advanced as Cousins' level of play or ability.
Again, your position here can largely be summed up as over-focus on 6 years (because it's not like people haven't acknowledged development in Cousins' game over time), total lack of context with respect to the Kings' actual roster and a given understanding of the arguments being made by people who happen to be supporting Cousins. You managed to ignore my point about ATG-level players failing to hit .500 on rosters which were similarly riddled with issues as the present Kings. A player can do only so much. A BIG can do only so much. Cousins has real problems with his game as far as being one of the most dominant players in the game, true.
That said, one of the many errors you're making is misreading what's going on. Most here haven't really been arguing that Cousins has been a top 5 player the entire time. A lot of the pro-Cousins stuff has come in context with his performance during the month of January. For the sake of renewing that angle of discussion, he played 15 games in January while posting 31.5 ppg, 12.9 rpg and 3.1 apg in 36.5 mpg on 48.0% FG, 42.2% 3P on 3 3PA/g and 72.9% FT to produce 56.5% TS across 37.7% USG. The Kings went 8-7 that month.
Since then, they're 1-2 in February while he's posted 27, 10.5 and 7.0 on 48.8% FG, 57.1% 3P on 3.5 3PA/g and 57.1% FT for 54.9% TS across 32.6 mpg in the 2 games he's played in 38.5 mpg. They're 0-2 in that time.
He has to be a mythic, ATG titan in order for this team to win at the level you want to see. It's not a sensible criticism. The Kings are BAAAAAAD. Really bad. When he's not balling out like Shaq with a jimmy and a score to settle, they're basically done before they even start because of how atrociously porous is their defense and how generally limited is the support Cousins gets from his teammates. Gay has regressed considerably, Rondo is using scoring possessions (which is an awful thing, even if his playmaking has lots of value) and it's just a giant cluster.
This is not something which can be ignored. This team is just THAT bad. There are a couple of players in the league whom one might expect to reasonably do a little bit better than this than has Cousins, but I mean we saw the result. Let me try this another way.
Second-year Shaq (29/13/2.5, 59.9% FG, 120 ORTG, .252 WS/48, +5.4 OBPM) and rookie Penny managed to put together a 50-win team alongside Nick Anderson, Scott Skiles, Dennis Scott and the rest.
That's pretty impressive. It's not proportionate to the level of impact you are representing as prerequisite for the kind of status Shaq held in the league and based on his numbers, but no one in their right mind would say Shaq was an "empty stats" player. Now, THAT Shaq and Penny (who was himself roughly a 16/5/6.5 player) achieved 50 wins. Cousins isn't Shaq and he's got nothing like that sort of supporting cast, AND he's got a coach who is actively encouraging him for the first time to do something that is generally not a consistently intelligent option for him on offense (i.e. "take threes," much like Monty is doing with the Brow). The team is basically incompetent and incapable of winning anything at all without him, a trend which extends over several years now.
What is it which we should be expecting from Cousins, exactly? What voodoo should he be performing to make this team win a lot more under the conditions in which he is asked to operate? It's really nice and great to say "aww man, they should be winning more and so Cousins isn't all that good" and everything, but HOW?
All-time-high offensive burden, dreadful coaching, dreadful teammates, acknowledged that the player isn't an ATG offensive dynamo... what more is there? This angle of discussion is basically done, because you're being a little unreasonable.
. Just an empty stats guy am i rite guys /s
