With Cousins and Cauley-Stein, Kings are building an actual brand of basketball

Behind their big-man duo DeMarcus Cousins and Willie Cauley-Stein, the Sacramento Kings are rounding from laughingstock into real team, writes Jonathan Raymond.

Sacramento Kings centres DeMarcus Cousins, left, and Willie Cauley-Stein, right, shown during a win over the Brooklyn Nets in the NBA in November. Rich Pedroncelli / AP / November 13, 2015

DeMarcus Cousins was scoring, passing, even initiating drive-and-kicks. Willie Cauley-Stein put down dunks and swiped a massive steal in the final seconds. They combined, sort of, for a big block in the waning moments.

The Sacramento Kings ran and moved the ball and played tight defence and everything interesting they could do in theory, they did, on Thursday night.

It all kind of worked, and a team that has been bad for over a decade and one of the NBA's consistent punchlines for a few years running beat last year's Eastern Conference finalists, the Atlanta Hawks.

This, in its way, is what going big looks like in a league where small ball is the reigning style of the day. What it looks like when centres with complementary skills can bring out the best in each other.

It just might, in its way, make the Kings a threat, or at least threatening. Which would be a massive step up from where they have occupied recently.

Sacramento fell to the league’s (maybe history’s) worst team, the Philadelphia 76ers, on New Year’s Eve. An embarrassing footnote for another forgettable Kings team which, after the loss, sat 12-20 and comfortably within the lower half of the Western Conference, where they pretty much always reside.

Then the calendar flipped, and they beat the Phoenix Suns on January 2 by 23. Weird, perhaps in its margin, but the Suns are sleepwalking at this point. Their win a couple nights later over the Oklahoma City Thunder, though, was an eyebrow-raiser.

Cousins was dangerous from long range, Cauley-Stein was back from an injury and looking active, Rajon Rondo was his improvisational best. They deflated an (admittedly Kevin Durant-less) Thunder side by 12.

In the nascent new year Sacramento are 7-3, with a plus-3.8 points per 100 possessions net rating that is the league’s seventh best over the past few weeks. They are playing at the fastest pace in the NBA. In addition to the Hawks and Thunder they have beaten the Los Angeles Clippers and Utah Jazz away, and their losses have been pretty reasonable.

The Kings, somehow, actually look pretty good.

Cousins and Cauley-Stein, with no small assist from an invested-looking Rondo, could be a revelatory combo. At 6ft 11in and 7ft 0in, respectively, they are starting to do the things a big-man-led team needs to thrive.

Cousins, 25, might finally be on his way to being the best centre in basketball. He’s starting to play a little more from the outside-in, with a burgeoning threepoint shot drawing defenders toward the perimeter and creating space in the middle for Rondo to roam around in. He’s good at exploiting it himself with almost impossible-to-stop drives and rolls. He is both handling and passing the ball well and proving he can function in a ball-moving offence (the Kings’s assist percentage when Cousins is on the floor is 64.1, second best on the team). He can, of course, still be brash and balletic in isolation in the post.

Cauley-Stein, meanwhile, is effectively converting the occasional roll to the rim, open look or putback for inside points (he’s shooting about 10 per cent better than league average from inside the zone nearest to the rim). He can protect the rim inside (holding opponents to a solid 46 per cent and blocking over a shot per game) and give Cousins, typically not a great rim protector, freedom to patrol a little farther away from the hoop. Cousins is defending shots inside six feet about 10 per cent less frequently than last season.

Due to various injury hiccups, they have not been able to play together a ton yet (201 minutes) but the Kings have been devastating when they share the floor – opponents scoring just 95.3 points per 100 possessions, with a plus-9.3 rating overall. Sacramento are 11-6 in the games they have played together.

Rondo looks like his old self feeding Cousins and creating looks for the likes of Rudy Gay, Omri Casspi and Ben McLemore in addition to Cousins and Cauley-Stein. And Sacramento score more points per 100 when he works with Cousins (105.3) or Cauley-Stein (104.8) than with every other teammate except McLemore.

Put it all together and the Kings very well might have something budding here. This is big-ball – not necessarily a team full of taller players, in the way small-ball is self-explanatory, but a team built to revolve around its bigs.

Improbably, George Karl is teasing a signature style out of this talented mish-mash of malcontents and castoffs.

They could stand to move Gay into more of a super sixth-man role, where his exceptional scoring talents can boost a fairly anemic bench and keep him from dragging down more defensively effective five-man units revolving around Cauley-Stein, Cousins and Rondo (Sacramento leak 107.2 points per 100 when Gay and Rondo share the floor). They should look at giving some of the struggling Marco Belinelli’s minutes to Seth Curry.

But those are nitpicks. With McLemore and Casspi giving them the kind of surrounding three-point threats any elite team has, with Rondo playing like he’s back in Boston, and most importantly with Cauley-Stein complementing Cousins inside, there is a real team there in Sacramento. An identity is forming.

With the Golden State Warriors paving the way for small-ball, a pair of giants a couple hours north in Sacramento are beginning to build their own interesting brand of basketball.

It probably won’t make them title contenders, at least this year. But they did play the Warriors pretty close in a loss on January 9. Went into half-time down just two. Were within five with under three minutes left.

And, wouldn’t you know it, after winning four in a row they occupy the eighth seed in the West. If the season ended today it’d be those Warriors they get to try their hand at.

And that, against all odds that would have existed just a few months ago, would be a pretty intriguing prospect.

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