Despite unleashing a fire-breathing rampage on a petrified National Basketball Association this season, Kings center DeMarcus Cousins will not be starting for the Western Conference in this year’s All-Star Game. And that doesn’t sit well with the Boogie Man.
A day after putting up a career-high 56 points on Monday in a loss to the Charlotte Hornets, Cousins was asked about what changes he would make to the All-Star balloting process.
“There definitely wouldn’t be fan voting,” the 25-year-old big man said to Marc J. Spears of Yahoo! Sports on Tuesday. “You can’t base it off of who is on TNT and ESPN every night. Of course, it’s going to be most winning teams’ [players], the most popular players [selected]. The other guys that play for the Milwaukee Bucks, and in our case the Sacramento Kings, who are playing just as good basketball, will never be seen. I don’t think it’s fair.”
Cousins is averaging 27.6 points per game and 11.4 rebounds per game in the 2015-16 campaign, including a silly 34.4 points per game and 13.6 rebounds per game in the month of January. But despite those numbers, he finished a distant tenth in fan All-Star voting amongst frontcourt players in the West, losing out on a starting spot to the likes of Kobe Bryant, Kawhi Leonard, and Kevin Durant.
The former No. 5 overall pick has looked like the best center in the league this season by a mile. But Cousins has been an unfortunate casualty of the tyranny of the popular majority as well as the abolishing of positional designations on the All-Star ballot. Playing on a small-market Sacramento team only getting four national TV appearances this year certainly doesn’t help his cause either.
At this point, that fan voting is a deeply flawed system which renders All-Star appearances an ineffective way of assessing legacy and greatness is common knowledge in NBA circles by now. It’s good to know that someone who is directly affected by its inadequacies like Cousins (as well as this fellow NBA superstar and former college teammate) feels the same way.
H/T theScore
