DeMarcus Cousins isn’t buying the easy comparison between his old New Orleans pairing with Anthony Davis and the Miami Heat’s new frontcourt look with Bam Adebayo and Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Cousins and Davis were one of the league’s most imposing big-man combinations back in 2017, when the New Orleans Pelicans brought them together. The duo pushed all the way to the Western Conference Semifinals in 2018 and left enough of a footprint that people still use them as a measuring stick for modern frontcourt tandems.
That’s part of why the Heat conversation has picked up so quickly. Adebayo and Antetokounmpo give Miami a rare All-Star-big-man pairing, and that alone has invited comparisons to the Cousins-Davis setup. But Cousins made it clear he sees major differences between the two duos.
Speaking on Gil's Arena, Cousins said, "I think our skill set was way different than Bam and Giannis. We were running P&Rs.
One of them is a limited shooter. Me and AD weren’t limited shooters.
We could shoot off the dribble; it’s a totally different thing,"
Cousins’ point was simple: his partnership with Davis worked in a different version of the league, and the way they operated offensively wasn’t the same as what Miami is putting together now. Back in the late 2010s, the Golden State Warriors’ influence had already reshaped how teams thought about big lineups, but Cousins and Davis still found a way to make their tandem work.
For the Heat, though, the focus is on what comes next. They don’t need to prove they’re the same kind of duo Cousins and Davis were, because that chapter is long closed.
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