The most hilariously galling thing about the Golden State Warriors – the crowning jewel of the outside-the-place-where-the-boxes-are-made thinking that both gobsmacks and grates the rest of the basketball community – is encapsulated neatly in the DeMarcus Cousins signing.
Consider the following:
You have in Cousins a dominant but injured, irritating and irritable player whom nobody wants because his Achilles tendon is underfunctional and his price tag is believed to be gargantuan. It was an easy call for a general manager to move on to other potential roster solutions, so all 30 decided to do just that.
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Except that Cousins wasn’t sitting back and accepting unemployment. He had his agent, Jarinn Akana, make some calls, one to Golden State’s Bob Myers. Myers, who had only a mid-level exception slot that offered Cousins barely $5 million while costing the team more than $21 million when tax is added, threw the idea out to his Council Of Ministers (a.k.a. his most valued players), all of whom approved enthusiastically.
And it was done – Myers, and by proxy Joe Lacob, at their Steinbrennerian best. They paid the NBA $16 million for the right to pay DeMarcus Cousins $5 million, accepted the fact he’d be available for barely half a season, and then if all went well would almost surely leave for the big-money deal he was on track to receive before his leg exploded.
Let’s run that again. They paid $21 million to sign a guy who would be inactive for at least a third of the basketball calendar, rent his services so that he could enhance his value and leave for a place where his goal would be to find a better job with another team so that he could beat the team that helped resuscitate him. And that team was totally good with it.
Now that is the kind of breathtaking arrogance that the faint of heart do not consider. And it is an arrogance that works both ways, since Cousins is gambling on himself the way the Warriors are. Both he and Myers broke any number of conservative lines of thought to make Cousins The Warrior an actual thing, and needed barely a few hours to do so.
Golden State Warriors
In fairness, this could not happen had not Cousins decided that he needed to make his own market since none was coming to him, and would willingly take small money to chase big money. It could not have happened had Myers not opened up to the idea and then shared it with his most trusted players, which is also rarely done in the hierarchical world of the NBA. It could not have happened if Myers couldn’t sell the idea to Joe Lacob, who is already so loose with his money that casinos fight for the right to serve him free drinks.
And it could not happen if the Warriors weren’t so sure of their place in the universe that they could invest more than $20 million in a player who would in a year’s time be trying to defeat them.
So yes, I get why the rest of Basketball.Org might be infuriated with the Warriors again. They were bolder with Cousins than the Lakers were with LeBron James the day before, and they got the added benefit of reminding everyone in the sport just who is who’s daddy.
Somewhere, Daryl Morey’s obsession just died a thousand deaths, and somewhere else, Magic Johnson just realized how much longer his own dreams have been deferred. And Bob Myers is smoking a gigantic cigar on his back porch and wondering if he could find uses for Sidney Crosby, Mookie Betts and Diana Taurasi.