Okay; there, I said it. I hate to bad mouth another blogger, but after reading a piece on the suspension of Sacramento's DeMarcus Cousins I kind of felt like I had to.
For those that do not know this is what I have been able to gather went down:
Friday night the Kings and Spurs were playing in a rather hotly contested game. With time ticking away in the final period Cousins made a couple baskets and drew a foul on Spurs star Tim Duncan. Cousins, being tthe fiery kind of guy that he is, turned to his bench and talked trash.
Duncan responded by blocking one of Cousins shots and scoring three baskets of his own.
Spurs commentator Sean Elliot took that time as a chance to chide Cousins for talking trash when there was still a lot of basketball left to be played. Now he did do like commentators are prone to do in cases like this and he attempted to wax poetic about it, but the basic message was pretty simple:
Kid (because Cousins is a young one), shut your mouth and play the game.
Apparently someone told Cousins what Elliot said after the game or somehow he heard. So after the game he hung out on the court while Elliot did his post-game show and then confronted him. The two clearly had words and then they went their separate ways.
On Sunday the NBA suspended Cousins for two games for confronting Sean Elliot in a hostile manner following the game.
I'll get right to the point here. My esteemed blogging brethren seemed to think that the NBA was wrong here because Sean Elliot has a history of being kind of a punk, and that the way Cousins acts is normal among NBA players.
He was right on one point. NBA players--athletes in general--talk trash. What they don't do is lie in wait when a game is over so that they can confront a person that was talking about the game and happened to not be flattering towards him. This is not professional and should have been hit with a much harder punishment than what it was.
The incident was compared to another in which a player was suspended a pair of game after throwing an elbow during play. That incident was wrong as well. Not to defend it, but at least the person could reasonably use the heat of the moment as a mitigating factor.
Cousins had plenty of time to cool down and come to his senses. There was no heat of the moment. If incidents like this are not treated harshly then there is no telling what a player will do next when a commentator is not nice to them on the air.
When you consider the history of questionable behavior by Cousins from his time in high school to the present Sacramento fans should feel lucky that he is not suspended for more than two games.
Oh--and to anyone that passes of his past behavior to anyone else--you couldn't be more wrong. Every person on this planet is responsible for his own actions regardless of what another person does to possibly antagonize them. It's called being a responsible adult; something even the most talented of NBA players need to be.
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