It is official: DeMarcus Cousins makes every team he touches way worse because he utterly fails to play anything resembling winning basketball. This fact was official before, because anyone with eyes can see that that was the case, but it’s even officialer now. Now that his replacement Nikola Mirotic has contributed 36 efficient points to another Pelicans blowout victory.
The Pelicans, as stated many times over the years, have been my darkhorse WCF team for a long time now. They are not darkhorse anymore. And I don’t think they’re going to stop at the WCF. It’s only been two games, but let’s do a rundown on those two games which will show that this sample size is plenty large enough.
Game 1: Destroyed the Rockets harder than their current iteration had ever been destroyed.
Game 2: Almost dropped 150 in regulation against a team that claims not to be tanking and we’ll just have to take them at their word won’t we.
Also Mirotic is now averaging 33 points on the season, which won’t continue, but is such a high number that he’s basically guaranteed to average 20 over the whole year unless he dies or he accidentally lets his beard grow back. That was the reason he turned so good in the first place, so he’d better be careful. They say not to skip leg day, but he needs to be worried about skipping beard day.