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Twitter reacts to surprising trade sending Cousins to New Orleans

By

Josh Lander

/

NEW ORLEANS – At 24-33, the Sacramento Kings are actually only a game-and-a-half out of the last playoff spot in the NBA’s Western Conference behind the Denver Nuggets.

That wasn’t enough to keep the team from trading away the best big man in a Kings jersey since Chris Webber nearly 20 years ago, as they sent Demarcus Cousins to the New Orleans Pelicans for guards Buddy Hield, Tyreke Evans and Langston Galloway, as well as its 2017 first-round and second-round picks. The three guards combine for a season average of: 26.7 PPG, 8.4 RPG, 6.1 APG, 1.93 SPG and .36 BPG

Cousins leads the Kings in literally every major statistic except for steals, and edges out the combination of all three guards in most: 27.8 PPG, 10.6 RPG, 4.8 APG, 1.36 SPG (Rudy Gay leads the team with 1.5) and 1.3 BPG.

At the end of the day, this trade came down to the fact that the Kings’ front office didn’t think it had a legitimate shot to re-sign its All-Star center after the end of next season, the fourth and final year of his contract. Cousins, currently 25-years-old, is set to make more than $18 million during the 2017-’18 season, all of which will be considered dead cap.

To make things slightly more interesting, Cousins found out that he was being traded to the All-Star Game’s host city while giving an interview after said All-Star Game. You can hear the PR official say, “All-Star questions first please.” To which Cousins responds, “What other kind of questions we got?”

The real uproar from Kings’ fans and NBA followers around the country stems from the value the team received for trading away its best player, especially when he had one more guaranteed year left in a Kings’ uniform. Defenders of the move will say the player fondly known as Boogie was more trouble than his stat line was worth, and getting sending him away will lead to the type of move referred to as “addition by subtraction.”

Either way, here’s a look at some of the reaction from a bevy of NBA media members and others around the league:

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