DeMarcus Cousins confronts local columnist in locker room
No one comes out looking good in this situation
By
Matt Moore
•
3 min read
Sacramento Kings forward DeMarcus Cousins is the center of controversy again following a locker room incident earlier this week.
At the center of the dispute between Cousins and Sacramento Bee columnist Andy Furillo is a column Furillo wrote about the ongoing investigation into a nightclub incident involving Cousins and teammate Matt Barnes. Furillo has written a series of columns regarding Cousins, describing him as a cancer and consistently criticizing his role on the Kings and in the locker room.
None of this is new or out of the ordinary. It takes just about as fast to find someone to claim the Kings' biggest problem is Cousins as it does to find someone in Sacramento who believes Cousins' biggest problem is the Kings.
However, Furillo, in attempting to make a case that Cousins has a substantially negative off-court reputation, invoked a nightclub incident from May in which Cousins' brother was arrested and Cousins was in attendance. That set Cousins off, as in the above video. Cousins says the columnist is welcome to write whatever he wants but to leave his brother out of it.
This continues to be a complicated issue to unravel. If this were Cousins' first incident of dealing with the media in a brusque or unprofessional manner, that would be one thing, but it is not. And if it were merely a cold shoulder or an uncomfortable interaction in a scrum, that would be one thing, but it is not.
The video, outside of the context of Furillo's comments about a player's brother who is not in the spotlight as far as the NBA is concerned, shows a 6-10 center standing over a much smaller, older writer, pointing his finger at him and speaking in a manner that can be described as intimidating. That's a problem for everyone -- the Bee, the Kings, the NBA, Cousins, Fuirllo, the whole bag.
But you cannot remove context, and most people, if asked how they would respond to what they felt was unfair criticism of their sibling, would likely volunteer a disregard for social norms and professionalism. Then again, players exist outside of that context and, fairly or not, are held to a higher standard of scrutiny, and from Furillo and the Bee's perspective, that line of criticism regarding Cousins' brother was warranted in context.
We can go round and round on this, but at the end, whatever your preconceived notions are will be reinforced. If you feel Cousins is a cancer whose disregard for appropriate behavior is a major liability with him and at the center of his team's failures, you'll find this incident to reinforce that viewpoint. If, instead, you feel the media is a vicious, biased entity out to tear down athletes, or at least Cousins, you'll sympathize with Cousins' reaction. And on it goes.
(It is at this point I feel compelled to note, for perhaps the zillionth time, that before the incident with Barnes, Cousins himself has never been implicated in an off-court incident since arriving in the NBA, and has given an incredible amount of time and resources to community efforts in his time with the Kings. At the same time, Cousins is an on-court moper who has been talked about by no single source of information as a real problem in the locker room.)
The evaluation likely closest to the truth is that there are no wins here. No one comes out looking good. The Bee looks like a publication that has enabled criticism outside the boundaries of what some consider acceptable about an athlete. At best, Cousins looks like a petulant child, once again throwing a fit because the story being told is not the one he wants. At worst, it looks like an NBA All-Star threatening a journalist, which is at the source of great consternation for other journalists who share concern over this kind of approach spreading to other, perhaps more appropriate boundaries of criticism.
What is apparent beyond all else is that the DeMarcus Cousins situation in Sacramento continues to get worse, not better, with no real end in sight, and until such change occurs, the media environment, fair or unfair, is equally unlikely to shift.
Cousins may face league punishment for the incident, USA Today reports.
