NBA: DeMarcus Cousins isn’t finished as impact player after ACL injury

Despite a devastating ACL tear, DeMarcus Cousins can still return in the future to be an impact player in the NBA.

The news of DeMarcus Cousins tearing his ACL during a workout in Las Vegas brought with it an outpouring of sadness from much more than just the Los Angeles Lakers fans who had hoped he would form part of a new superteam alongside LeBron James and Anthony Davis. The entire NBA community reached out to support the former All-Star.

That was along with a fear for Lakers fans, compounded with persistent reports that the Lakers may now turn to Dwight Howard to fill the hole left by Cousins on the roster. No, this was a sadness felt around the league as a whole.

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Perhaps not quite on the same level as that dark night when Derrick Rose suffered the same injury against the Philadelphia 76ers in the playoffs back in 2012, but not far off.

Cousins is a divisive figure in the NBA, but those who like him, well … they like him … and to see him suffer a third serious injury (to go with his Achilles tear with the New Orleans Pelicans and quad injury with the Golden State Warriors) was cruel.

About the only saving grace being that it happened away from the fans and their incessant recording that occurs throughout a professional basketball game.

Another added twist of the knife comes with the knowledge that Cousins, fresh off of playing on a minimum contract with the Warriors and having signed for similar money to go to Los Angeles, will likely never secure the bag that his talents deserved.

A fact lost on most, and in some ways rightly so, but a healthy Cousins deserved to be paid like the top earners in the NBA today.

We need to stop short of writing the obituary of Cousins however, because no matter what some might say, he is going to get another chance in the league to prove he can be an impact player, and he is going to be able to take it as well. Here is how.

Talents like Cousins are, rightly or wrongly, given countless chances to play for an NBA team before it is truly over. You need only look at some examples from this decade alone, to see that at the very least, Cousins is going to be given another chance. Or three.

That is the first positive which he can build upon.

The aforementioned Howard has seen his stock fall harder than pretty much anybody else since 2010, and yet he’s still knocking around.

It is widely accepted that he is not a good presence to have in a locker room and the fact he’s been moved four times in four seasons is testament to this, despite the fact he is going to go into the Hall of Fame one day.

Cousins doesn’t have the resume of early Howard during his time with the Orlando Magic, but he is talented enough for an organization to take a flyer on him once he is healthy again. There are other examples, such as the enigmatic Larry Sanders.

Mental health issues caused him to step away from the game while with the Milwaukee Bucks, the right move for him personally at that time.

When he felt he was ready to make a return the Cleveland Cavaliers, at the time the best team in the Eastern Conference, were only too happy to give him a roster spot.

You can’t teach height and although the commitment of Sanders to the game of basketball was questioned, the Cavaliers thought he was worth a look.

Yes his was an injury of the mental kind, but that in itself can be even more tricky to gauge. We can see an ACL or an Achilles mend before our eyes. What we cannot see is how somebody is feeling in their own mind.

It didn’t work out for Sanders in Cleveland, but he spent some more time with their G-League affiliate the Canton Charge before stepping away for good.

If Sanders made it known he was ready to play basketball again professionally tomorrow, you can bet teams would show interest. We live in a world where Amar’e Stoudemire and Monta Ellis can get over 10 NBA teams to come and look at them workout.

That same world afforded Greg Oden a chance to play for the contending Miami Heat, who at the time boasted LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.

Oden arrived with everybody knowing that he left the Portland Trail Blazers because of persistent injuries issues. It would be kind to say that he was playing on one leg during the 23 occasions he lined out for the Heat.

Yet he still got that chance and one more over in China for good measure. Cousins, for all the devastation around him in the last couple of years, has played in 565 games.

Oden only ever got to 105. You can look at that as saying that perhaps his body has already broken down from those games, but he surely has more left in the tank.

“Load management” is the buzzword of the league these days, and if Cousins accepts that these words will now follow him around for the rest of his professional career, he can still do a job for a contending outfit.

We’ll never know, but perhaps the Lakers would have needed too much out of him and an injury such as this would have happened anyway.

What we saw while he was with the Warriors is what his future can look like as well. A player who looked woefully off the pace initiall  and who it was sad to watch struggle so badly compared to his days with the Sacramento Kings, when he dominated.

But there were moments too, when the old Cousins shone through, and they can return again, even if in small bursts.

His last four regular season games he scored over 20 points, in what was four wins for the Warriors. He did so averaging 27 minutes per contest. Cousins even contributed in the Finals loss to the Toronto Raptors too, but by that stage the series was over.

They were down Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson, meaning too much was expected of Cousins.

We know now that’s too much for to handle going forward, because it was too much for him even then. But let us not forget he’s a four time All-Star too. Somebody who knows what it takes to play at the highest levels of the game, and who you can be sure is not going down without a fight.

He is so gifted offensively, and in some ways his 3-point shooting abilities (career 33.2 percent from deep) arrived about five years too early and so were not refined or appreciated properly at the time.

Defensively he makes a difference as well and if he can do both of those things off the bench in future, then he is still going to have a job in the NBA for years to come.

DeMarcus Cousins is not finished, far from it. Things are just going to be different now, but different is what he’s been ever since he entered the league. No point in switching gears and onto the road traveled by everybody else now.