Former NBA star DeMarcus Cousins appeared on the latest episode of the Run Your Race podcast, where he spoke about his time with the Golden State Warriors. Cousins was with the Warriors in the 2018-19 season and revealed that head coach Steve Kerr would call out the players for disrespecting the competition.
“It was so bad, bro,” Cousins said. “Steve used to be like, ‘Man, y’all are being disrespectful.’ It was times we going out there [for warmups] with like 6 minutes on the clock. Steve like, ‘You guys gotta show some type of respect.'”
Host Theo Pinson revealed that teams usually go out for warmups with about 20 minutes left. The Warriors, though, were so confident they were going to win that they’d show up far later than that.
“He’s not even really tripping on the fact that we’re going out that late because he knows we’re showing up,” Cousins stated. “We going to do our job every night. It was just the look of it. It’s just like, this s*** getting a little disrespectful. Steph [Curry] like, ‘Guys, come on, man.'”
The optics weren’t great, but when you have a team with Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green, it can be difficult at times to take the competition too seriously. That Warriors team was just too good, and they were the two-time defending champions at the time as well.
After losing in the 2016 NBA Finals to the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Warriors shocked the basketball world by signing Durant in free agency. A superstar of his caliber joining a team that had set a new NBA record by going 73-9 in the 2015-16 season meant the rest of the league could kiss their chances of winning a title goodbye.
The Warriors crushed the competition in 2016-17, going 67-15 in the regular season and 16-1 in the playoffs. The Houston Rockets managed to offer some resistance in the 2018 postseason, but Golden State prevailed in the end.
As if it wasn’t unfair enough to have such a loaded team, the Warriors signed Cousins as a free agent in 2018. The big man had torn his Achilles earlier that year and wasn’t the force he once was, but it was more firepower for a team that didn’t need it.
The Warriors got off to a 10-1 start in the 2018-19 season, and you wondered if this team was going to just run over the league. Injuries then started to slow them down a bit, and that would be a sign of things to come.
The Warriors would still finish that season as the top seed in the West with a 57-25 record. Despite Durant suffering an injury in the Conference Semifinals against the Rockets, the team made its way back to the NBA Finals. They’d face the Toronto Raptors on the big stage, and things would go horribly wrong in that series.
The Raptors took a 3-1 lead in Durant’s absence to put the Warriors on the brink of elimination. The superstar would return for Game 5 but tore his Achilles in the second quarter.
The Warriors still managed to win on the night to stave off elimination, but would then see Thompson tear his ACL in Game 6. That was one too many injuries to overcome, and the Raptors would emerge triumphant in six games.
Cousins would finish the 2018-19 season with averages of 16.3 points, 8.2 rebounds, 3.6 assists, 1.3 steals, and 1.5 blocks per game. He’d leave the Warriors following that loss and join the Los Angeles Lakers.
Cousins, though, would tear his ACL in a pickup game in the summer of 2019 before ever suiting up for the Lakers. That proved to be the beginning of the end of his NBA career, as he played his last game in the league in 2022.
