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Kings hit DeMarcus Cousins with 'substantial fine,' but no suspension, over explosion at columnist

Dan Devine
Senior NBA writer

The Sacramento Kings have slapped DeMarcus Cousins with “a substantial fine” after his recent explosion on a local newspaper columnist over a heavily critical piece about the All-Star center written in the wake of his recent involvement in an alleged off-court incident at a New York City nightclub.

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Cousins will not be suspended in connection with the incident, according to a team statement obtained by Marc J. Spears of The Undefeated:

“The Kings have a clear set of standards of conduct expected of our entire organization. As a result of negative interactions with certain members of the media that were not corrected after verbal warnings, we have decided to impose a substantial fine,” the team said in the statement. “If this behavior is repeated again we will be forced to consider further discipline.”

Bill Lindelof of the Sacramento Bee later reported, citing a “source who was knowledgeable about the fine but not authorized to speak publicly,” that the Kings fined Cousins $50,000 for the incident.

“This behavior,” in case you missed it over the weekend, was Cousins confronting Sacramento Bee columnist Andy Furillo over a Dec. 9 piece. In the course of taking Cousins and teammate Matt Barnes to task for their choice of after-hours activities, after two partygoers at the Manhattan nightspot Avenue accused the Kings payers of assaulting them in an incident that has since sparked a civil lawsuit, Furillo referenced a less-publicized incident from earlier this year involving Cousins and his younger brother, Jaleel, who plays center for the Texas Legends, the D-League affiliate of the Dallas Mavericks:

For Cousins, this is his second late-night outing on the club circuit this year that ended badly. In May, TMZ caught him at The DrYnk in Tampa with his younger brother, Jaleel. The celebrity gossip website reported that he and his brother were trying to get into the club’s DJ area when a confrontation broke out. Jaleel wound up getting shocked with a Taser and arrested while friends hustled DeMarcus out of the place.

Now, along with The DrYnk, Cousins will always have the Avenue.

Maybe he, and Barnes, should find better places to hang out.

Three days later, when he encountered Furillo in the Kings locker room, Cousins read the columnist the riot act:

The Bee responded to the incident by calling Cousins on the carpet for “grossly unprofessional behavior” in an “attempt to control the media,” and produced a video depicting multiple instances of Cousins confronting reporters over items with which he objected or, in one case, outright refusing to answer any outlets’ questions unless a representative of one particular outlet (Cowbell Kingdom, part of ESPN’s TrueHoop Network) was removed from the locker room. According to Leo Beas, Cowbell Kingdom’s managing editor, there’s more where that came from.

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While some media members called Cousins’ reaction to Furillo “troubling” and chastised him for “bullying” a columnist, the big man’s two most recent coaches — Kings head coach Dave Joerger, and Duke boss Mike Krzyzewski, for whom Cousins played on the edition of Team USA that won gold at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro — both expressed support for Cousins. Joerger called the Bee’s coverage of the incident “ridiculous”. Coach K said the center “gets a bad rap sometimes.”

This, as our Kelly Dwyer wrote on Saturday, is a mess, very much in keeping with the seemingly unending run of dysfunction, absurdity and nonsense that has spanned both Boogie’s six-year tenure in Sacramento and the handful of years that preceded his arrival. As we’ve now learned, though, it is not enough of a mess for the Kings to take Cousins — who enters Tuesday’s play fourth in the NBA in scoring at 28.6 points per game and 11th in the league in rebounding with an average of 10.7 caroms a contest — out of the lineup.

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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!