Cousins failure to get to the postseason comes down to a couple reasons in my opinion.
Our over reliance on him to carry the team. We have more shooters and IQ guys on this team than ever before, yet we ran the simplest of offensive sets with him. It made it way too easy to cover him. The fact that he was still successful in it was just a testament to his skills. If he's shooting 45% from the field, you're using him wrong. It wasn't until recently that he started passing the ball more, that they actually started to win some games. The problem is that him being our assist leader is an incredibly inefficient way to run the offense. Our PG's basically get the same amount of assists as him per game, but with half the turnovers. Let your point guards do most of the assisting and let them actually get him easier looks. Assists stay the same, turnovers go down and his shooting percentages go up. Let him make natural passes within the offense instead of basically telling the opposing team what we're running every play. That would net us a couple possessions a game where we would get shots up instead of turning the ball over.
Not getting back on defense. Joerger said exactly what we've been thinking, that Cousins wastes 6 or 7 possessions a game. It didn't always involve arguing with the refs. Sometimes he would just miss a layup and then kind of hang his head and pause there for a couple seconds before jogging back on defense. We've had so many close games this year. Who knows how many more we would have won if we could have gotten those defensive possessions back. Malone would ride his ass for it and he did it a lot less. Joerger was more relaxed, just like every previous coach was. Malone would call an immediate timeout after a single bad defensive possession. Cousins needs a coach that is going to force him to either get back down the court or ride the bench if he cannot do that. I'm just guessing here but if the opposing team gets to play 5 on 4 for about 6 possessions a game and they shoot about 50% on those possessions, that means they're probably going to score about 6-7 points a game due to him not getting back on defense.
Take those 6-7 points and add it to the 2-3 points we lose by using him as our main ball distributor and that's 8-10 points per game that the Kings are spotting their opponents every game. I know it's not that cut and dry but it's obvious that the Kings were spotting their opponents a handful of points a game. I think the front office and coaching both failed him and never really properly used him other than when Malone was here. Even with our current roster, I think we could have been up there around the same record as the Thunder if he was just properly coached.
