The DeMarcus Cousins extension may be bad news for the NBA

Going back years now, there have been near-constant rumors that the Sacramento Kings will trade DeMarcus Cousins. The Kings have been a laughingstock for years and Cousins is a star they have no chance to keep when he hits unrestricted free agency, the rationale goes.

Maybe the Boston Celtics will land him. Maybe it’ll be the Los Angeles Lakers. Maybe it’ll be some mystery team. But the default assumption in and around the league for a good, long while has been that the marriage between Cousins and the Kings will not outlast the four-year extension he signed back in 2013.

A Tuesday evening report from CSN California’s James Ham, though, painted a much different picture of the future for both Cousins and the Kings.

"CSN California has confirmed through a league source that the two sides have tossed around numbers and that barring a late change in direction by either side, Cousins intends to sign a massive, max-money extension, estimated at roughly $207 million during the offseason that will keep the big man in a Kings uniform long-term."

Following the Kings’ 100-94 win over the Detroit Pistons later that night, Cousins was asked by the assembled media in Sacramento about the report that he’d likely be sticking around. Cousins responded by asking the media if they wanted him to stay in Sacramento — because of course he did — but he also let on that he has no plans to be anywhere else. “I love Sacramento,” Cousins said. “This is where I want to be.”

It was a not-all-that-shocking response to a what could only be described as a very shocking report, given the intense speculation surrounding Cousins over the last few years and the fact that the Kings have shown no real signs of being able to build a contender around him, or even a functional team for that matter. Star players almost never come right out and say they want to leave their current team, after all; they push for a new destination through back-channels. Viewed in light of the changes made in the recent Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations, maybe the report isn’t actually that shocking.

(Though one couldn’t help but wonder if we’d still be hearing this talk if this were a typical race for the Western Conference’s 8-seed. The Kings are 16-22 and somehow only a half-game out of a playoff spot. In a typical year, they’d likely six or seven games out by now and nobody would talking about how they’re surprisingly competent playoff contenders. They’d be the same old Kings, which, really, they kind of are.)

The newly-created Designated Player Extension allows teams to offer in-their-prime homegrown stars so much more money than anyone else can — the Kings can offer Cousins about $80 million more than any other team — that the desire to be elsewhere, immediately, would have to be almost impossibly strong in order for it to overwhelm the desire to jump on that cash.

The owners obviously pushed for the new rule at least in part as a reaction to Kevin Durant signing with the 73-win Golden State Warriors — a signing made possible by the fact that the owners themselves pushed so hard during the 2011 CBA negotiations for a rule that would eliminate extend-and-trades like the one that sent Carmelo Anthony to the New York Knicks that they accidentally eliminated the motivation for any star veteran to sign an extension of any kind. (Limiting the number of years an extension could tack onto the current contract and the size of the raise a player could get over his current deal basically forced all star players into free agency if they wanted to maximize their market value.)

In this case, the NBA may again have unintentionally created new consequences that may not actually be desirable. The NBA’s popularity is soaring like never before. There is legitimate interest in the league year-round now, and though much of it is obviously driven by ever-rising quality of play and ridiculous numbers being compiled by several stars around the league, a great deal of that popularity has been generated by the crazy player movement the league has experienced ever since LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh decided to join forces with the Miami Heat back in 2010.

The league may publicly say that it’s not good for business, but stars flitting around the league from city to city, whether on their own or in combinations, has been a major driver of the massive interest boom. The Flying Death Machine Heat teams, the Lob City Clippers, and the current versions of the Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers may make other owners fume about a lack of fairness and parity, but it’s hard to deny that the league has benefited overall from their constant presence on television and in the minds of fans anywhere. And while the league is set up as a competition between 30 teams vying for the right to call themselves champions for the next year, it is at its heart just a way for the owners themselves to generate value for themselves.

By giving so-called home teams so much of an advantage in re-signing star players, the owners that actually employ one of those players gave themselves a nice little advantage; but they also may have eliminated (or at least curtailed) one of the things that has helped drive so much interest in the league: the possibility that one or more stars may change teams at any point. Free agency periods devoid of in-their-prime stars like Cousins simply will not drive as much interest as those the league has seen over the last several years.

If Boogie and Paul George and Gordon Hayward and whatever future stars that follow them never actually hit the open market, it’s great for the Kings and the Pacers and the Jazz. The loss of drama will give the owners of those teams peace of mind but it also deprives the league of some of the interest the drama generates. The Melodrama and the Dwightmare and the Durant sweepstakes may have been annoying as all hell, but damn it if they didn’t make the NBA more relevant and interesting. Day-to-day nuisance aside, those sagas were good for the league as a whole, if not necessarily for the Nuggets or Magic or Thunder individually.

Even after the creation of the new DPE, several small-market executives still insist the league didn’t go far enough in giving home teams an advantage in re-signing mid-career vets. Considering they already get to keep drafted stars for an absolute minimum of five years and that most get eight or more thanks to the built-in motivation for stars to sign rookie maximum extensions, calling $70-80 million advantages to re-sign those stars yet again (and give those teams 12-13 years of control) insufficient rings rather false.

It’s unquestionably a good thing that star players now have yet another avenue to make more money. They’re the ones putting fans in the stands and driving that year-round interest and they should reap the benefits. Creating that new avenue solely as a way to restrict their freedom of movement around the league, though, is a disappointing step backward for the recent “player control” era. It’s also a step that has the potential to spawn unintended consequences that could ultimately prove deleterious for the league, and that’s not great either.