Where does the suspended NBA season leave DeMarcus Cousins?

The interrupted NBA season will have countless ramifications for all stakeholders but it presents a particularly discouraging challenge for DeMarcus Cousins.

DeMarcus Cousins has played just 38 NBA games (30 regular season, eight playoff) since tearing his Achilles’ tendon more than two years ago when he was with the New Orleans Pelicans. That injury, in January 2018, was surely a factor in the Pelicans offering him, what seemed to be a below-market, two-year, $40 million free-agent contract that summer. Cousins declined but it turned out the market wasn’t what anyone expected and he ended up with the Warriors for the 2018-19 season on a one-year, $5 million prove-it deal.

Cousins looked decent for Golden State after fully rehabbing the Achilles’, joining their rotation at the end of January. In the playoffs, he tore a quadriceps muscle, worked frantically to return in time for the NBA Finals and promptly tore his ACL. What followed — another one-year prove-it-deal, this time with the Lakers, months of rehab and rolling return dates, then being released before he could make his season debut so the Lakers could add Markieff Morris for a stretch run — certainly hasn’t clarified anything.

At the time the NBA season was interrupted by the novel coronavirus pandemic, Cousins was unsigned and still working to get healthy. He apparently was continuing to workout at the Lakers facility even after he had been released, and there were rumors that he and the team had a mutual interest in working out a new deal for next season.

Even if something with the Lakers does materialize, it seems unlikely there would be a big salary or many years on the table. Maybe he will have impressed the team enough to secure more than another one-year deal, but the four-time All-Star will probably be heading into his age-29 season without much job security and plenty of questions about what he still has to offer.

Even when he was at his physical peak, Cousins’ defense was problematic and it’s hard to imagine the time off will have done him any favors in that department. The league has continued to evolve in his absence and contenders like the Rockets and Celtics are regularly playing without even a nominal center, let alone a traditional paint-bound one Cousins could comfortably be matched with. Depending on what happens in the draft, it’s easy to imagine the Warriors playing similarly next season as well.

That shift doesn’t just give him fewer places to hide on defense, it also could represent fewer opportunities on offense. Playing with the Warriors was supposed to fully optimize Cousins’ outside shooting but he made just 27.4 percent of his limited attempts there and that was, structurally speaking, the ideal offensive context for his floor spacing. He made 35.9 percent of his 3s in his interrupted stint with New Orleans but just 32.2 in his six-and-a-half seasons with Sacramento. The point being, his value as a high-volume, floor-spacing big is still somewhat theoretical.

In his last pre-injury season, the first half of 2017-18, Cousins was very effective as an offensive fulcrum inside the arc. He averaged 9.3 potential assists per game, about the same as Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokic, and really leveraged his face-up game to take opposing bigs off the dribble from the elbows and the mid-post. He averaged 9.3 drives per game, shooting 52.4 percent and drawing a foul on 13.4 percent.

However, even in what was arguably Cousins’ best offensive season, you still had to take the good with the bad. He posted a career-high turnover percentage, was relatively ineffective as a post-scorer (53rd percentile in scoring efficiency) despite using a ton of possessions there and still found time to jack-up 69 pull-up 2-pointers in just 48 games. Cousins has always had an incredible offensive toolbox but he’s never really optimized the balance between all those tools.

Re-signing with the Lakers next season may be the best scenario in terms of system and opportunity. He could work as a primary bench scorer, scaffolding LeBron James and Anthony Davis and they are a team that could benefit from lightening the load on their stars without really making waves. It’s difficult to imagine him fitting in with any other fringe contenders looking for a complementary piece.

Having Cousins integrate on a new team while he is going through the process of stretching old basketball muscles and rediscovering how and where he can be effective is going to be a chaotic process. For a young team, looking to take a step forward it might be more trouble than it’s worth. For a middling team grasping at straws and looking to shake things up, there may be value, but first, they’ll have to walk the tightrope of figuring out how to use him in systems and rotations that do more good than harm.

In the grand scheme of things, we aren’t that far removed from the time when Cousins was a dominant offensive presence and a potential foundational player. But the game has changed, the league has changed and essentially two years away from NBA basketball have certainly changed him as well. Here’s hoping he can get back on the court next season, healthy and effective. But that looks like more a question than it ever has.