The entire basketball world is sad about the end of DeMarcus Cousins’ season. Cousins, who was in the midst of an All-Star campaign and looked like he was going to make the postseason for the first time in his career, suffered a ruptured achilles during New Orleans’ game against Houston on Friday night.
There were about a million reasons why it was so upsetting to watch Cousins get helped off the floor with the injury, one of which is that he was on pace to do something no player had ever done before. Everyone acknowledged that Cousins was putting up crazy numbers while lining up next to Anthony Davis, but it turns out they were better than you might expect.
According to Jared Dubin, Cousins’ brilliance this season meant that he was doing a little bit of everything for the Pelicans.
At the time his season ended, Boogie Cousins was doing something nobody else in the history of professional basketball had ever done: 25+ points, 12+ rebounds, 5+ assists, 1.5+ steals, 1.5+ blocks per game. pic.twitter.com/q4dOwnu1Mo
— Yaya Dubin (@JADubin5) January 27, 2018
Cousins is a guy whose entire basketball career has been defined by brilliant play that is squandered because asking him to do everything was far too much to ask of one player. But as he’s shown in New Orleans, and as the stats back up, Cousins is capable of putting up even better numbers when he’s on a team where he isn’t asked to do everything.
Who knows what Cousins will end up doing next season — he’s a free agent, and this is a serious injury. But for his sake, hopefully he’s able to come back better than ever next year and come close to making NBA history again.
