Unfortunately, DeMarcus Cousins Is Wrong About The NBA MVP Being ‘Mine To Grab’

DeMarcus Cousins is among a small number of players in basketball gifted enough to win the Maurice Podoloff Trophy. There’s just one problem for the Sacramento Kings All-Star, though: MVPs always come from winning teams.

In a story by Kevin Ding of Bleacher Report, the über-talented, hot-headed big man indicates that the league’s marquee individual award is his for the taking. Even more optimistic, however, is Cousins’ opinion that the re-built Kings will be fighting for a playoff berth in 2015-16.

Here’s Ding:

The topic is the 2015-16 NBA MVP award and whether it could be reachable for DeMarcus Cousins.

“Reachable, man?” Cousins told Bleacher Report, his voice rising high. “It’s mine to grab.”

[…]

“To have playoff expectations, it’s an exciting feeling,” Cousins said. “It’s one I’ve never felt.”

Cousins’ supreme confidence is only somewhat misplaced.

When Sacramento began last season 9-5 behind a much-improved defense and utterly dominant performances from its best player, there was a groundswell of support for Cousins to be included in the MVP conversation. But a viral infection sidelined the 25-year-old shortly thereafter, beginning a chain of events that led to the abrupt dismissal of coach Michael Malone, eventual hiring of George Karl, and the complete evaporation of the success and general goodwill that led to Cousins’ ascent up the league hierarchy.

But that first month of play combined with subsequent flashes of two-way force reserved for the game’s elite still managed to put him in rarified air at season’s end. Cousins was rewarded with an All-NBA Second Team selection for his career year, finally putting any remaining doubt of his long-term potential to rest.

There might only be one player in the league capable of taking any team to the playoffs, though, and Cousins definitely isn’t LeBron James. Did Sacramento do enough this summer to surround its superstar with the talent necessary to compete for the postseason? The names on its reconstructed roster alone certainly suggest as much.

Cousins, Rudy Gay, and Rajon Rondo might have made an effective, poor man’s Big Three one day, but certainly not now. Barring a return of the pre-injury burst that made him so effective on both ends of the floor, Rondo’s time as an All-Star caliber player is finished. He’s an extremely awkward fit with ball-dominant scorers like Cousins and Gay, too, and it remains to be seen how Karl will adjust his time-honored uptempo system to placate his oft-lumbering star.

We’re even more sure of this: the Western Conference has never been stronger. The Kings are firmly behind the Golden State Warriors, San Antonio Spurs, Oklahoma City Thunder, Houston Rockets, Los Angeles Clippers, and Memphis Grizzlies in the conference pecking order, and it would also shock if the New Orleans Pelicans and Utah Jazz aren’t better than Sacramento this season. That’s a full playoff field by itself, before accounting for Rick Carlisle’s Dallas Mavericks and the wildcard Phoenix Suns and Denver Nuggets.

Bottom line: The Kings don’t have a great chance to make the playoffs even if Karl manages to force his mismatched puzzle pieces into place. That says almost nothing of Cousins, either. The West is simply too difficult for any single player to lift his team to the postseason; if Russell Westbrook couldn’t do it last season, what makes you believe Cousins could pull it off against even greater competition?

And just like Westbrook finished on the MVP periphery in 2014-15, that’s the most hopeful outcome of Cousins’ year, too – pretty much no matter how well he might play.

[Via Bleacher Report]

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