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This sound you just heard, is that the NBA hit the ground on learning that All-Star DeMarcus Cousins has agreed to a one-year contract. worth $ 5.3 million with Golden State Warriors, two-time champion. In a move straight out of a poorly crafted video game, the Warriors – when they are healthy – can add a fifth All-Star to their starting lineup for less money than them. New York Knicks have just agreed to pay Mario Hezonja
How do the Cousins fit in the Bay Area? And how much will her addition help Golden State's chances of making four titles in five years?
How the Warriors Got Cousins
Let's start by answering the question of how that happened. As I explained last week, the tight market of free agents and especially centers made it possible to do business. Given these constraints, the Cousins market was hurriedly rushed
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The Dallas Mavericks, the team with the most motivated ceiling space to sign a center, quickly agreed terms with DeAndre Jordan. The Los Angeles Lakers have obviously given top priority to perimeter players for the one-year contracts they offered, signing the former Golden State Center JaVale McGee for the veteran's minimum. And Cousins' own team, the New Orleans Pelicans, got a cheaper, younger replacement in Julius Randle after the Lakers gave up his rights.
With the remaining teams with rebuilding hat space (Atlanta and Chicago), no need for a center (Philadelphia) or disinterested in a meeting (Sacramento), these movements left a signature contract and trading Cousins only the real hope of getting more than the exception mid-level non-taxpayer $ 8.6 million.
So, except if there is a suitor we do not know, chances are that Cousins did not really sacrifice much money to take the Warriors' smallest taxpayer. At that time, the chance to join the defending champions was probably worth a little less money for a year. Cousins will return to the free agency in a year hoping for a cheaper market because more teams will have ceiling space and it will be a year away from Achilles tendon rupture which ended his 2017-18 season before the All-Star break.
What Golden State can expect from Cousins?
The Achilles injury should temper expectations for Cousins to some extent. As I have already noted, the record of players returning from a broken Achilles tendon shows that they play about 8 percent of the time. 100 less next season than expected based on their stats from before the injury.
Of course, Cousins has a lot of room to decline and still be an elite player. Even after taking into account the injury, I projected Cousins to be 8.6 wins better than a replacement level player next season before considering where he would sign. That's more than the Warriors' combined WARC's 7.4 for the past season, and of course they'll still get additional contributions from Jordan Bell (1.8 WARP in 57 games as a rookie) and all the others centers that they sign
The screening did not delay the start of Cousins' season, and Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN reported that Cousins hoped to return in December or January. This would be a conservative timetable for the return of the Achilles rupture, suffered on January 26th. Last year, we saw Rudy Gay return to training camp after an Achilles injury suffered on January 18th.
If a team can afford to wait on Cousins, that is Golden State, which has prioritized pecking in the playoffs on the accumulation of regular season wins. Adding Cousins can force the Warriors to spend an extra spot on the depth of the center, but that's a price that Golden State will surely pay.
How will the Cousins adapt to Warriors?
new Golden State teammates. Cousins has used more than 30 percent of his team's games each of the past five seasons, 32 percent of which last year with pelicans. In contrast, only one Warrior Center has used more than 20% of the field team's games in 2017-18: David West at 22%. Previous beginners McGee (19 percent) and Zaza Pachulia (17 percent) had much lower rates of use, so something will have to give with the new start five when Cousins is healthy. Ideally, it will be Cousins, a scorer with lower returns in the past than most of his new All-Star teammates. 
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Cousins will also need to feel comfortable to make faster decisions with the attacking ball. He had the opportunity to hold the ball and pace the defense before deciding whether he was shooting, pbading or driving, which is frowned upon in the Golden State offensive because of the how he allows the defenses to take charge
. The follow-up of Cousins last season allowed him to keep the ball for 2.6 seconds, much longer than the Warriors' centers. Bell had the longest average contact time of these players at 1.7 seconds. In addition, Cousins' keys were longer than those of Draymond Green (2.2 seconds on average).
On the other end of the field, Cousins is not ideally suited to the heavy defense of Golden State. Per second track of Spectrum, Cousins only turned on 46 screens in 2017-2018, or 2.7% of the screens that he defended. Even Pachulia, the slowest of the Warriors' centers last season, changed 13 percent of the screens it defended. So Steve Kerr will want to avoid putting Cousins in situations where he has to change.
I would say that there is a risk for this signature for the Warriors. Cousins' relations with his teammates have been mixed, and those with coaches worse than that. If he does not want to or can not adapt his game, it's even possible that Cousins could hurt Golden State more than he does not help. In this case, however, the Warriors could simply seek to trade or move Cousins and continue with relatively little pain.
For all the critics who lament that Golden State continues to ruin the NBA, the good news is that it's almost certainly an annual partnership. The Warriors will be able to offer Cousins only $ 6.4 million to return in 2019-20 using non-bird rights, and if he plays well, Cousins will easily beat in free agency.
That said, in this case, the critics have something of a point. The addition of Cousins and Houston Rockets defensive striker Trevor Ariza, means that the gap between Golden State and the rest of the NBA seems to have only widened this offseason.
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