DeMarcus Cousins left the only NBA home he’s known on a private jet Tuesday afternoon.
Before Cousins, an all-NBA center, departed Sacramento for New Orleans, where he was traded Sunday, he left a heartfelt message on his Instagram account for Kings fans he said embraced him as a rookie out of Kentucky seven years ago.
The love Cousins portrayed into what amounted as a goodbye letter to Sacramento — he called Kings fans “family” — would be no surprise to Nuggets coach Michael Malone, who coached the talented and sometimes combustible Cousins for parts of two seasons with the Kings and has repeatedly said he enjoyed their relationship.
“I’m sure he’s hurt,” Malone said of Cousins. “He wanted to be in Sacramento. He loved the fans. Sometimes change is good for people. I reached out to him and he got back to me. He’s a lot closer to his home and his family in Mobile, Ala. He’s going to a team that has a chance to make the playoffs. The one thing, at the end of the day, that you can say about DeMarcus is that he’s a competitor. He loves to compete and he wants to win. That’s the one thing that has eluded him.”
If Cousins and fellow all-star big man Anthony Davis can find chemistry, something Malone cautioned could take time, the Pelicans could quickly become a threat to Denver’s hold on the No. 8 seed in the Western Conference playoff race. New Orleans, which sits 2½ games behind the Nuggets in the postseason chase as teams prepare to return to action Thursday, has a tough schedule ahead. But no other team in the league has two starters averaging better than 27 points and 10 rebounds per game like the Pelicans now have.
“It should be a lot of fun, two big guys on the same team,” said Nuggets guard , who, like Cousins and Davis, played college basketball at Kentucky. “They are two skilled big men, so once they learn how to play together they will be hard to play against.”
downplayed the impact Sunday’s seismic trade will have on the Nuggets, who still have three games left against the Pelicans (two of them at home).
“It doesn’t add pressure,” the Nuggets second-year center said. “We’re in a good spot, and we’re going to take it step by step by step. We’re just going to go out and play as hard as we can.”
