Then there's this curious passage in Jason Jones' piece.

Teams protest technical fouls all the time. As Jones notes elsewhere, the league rescinded one of Cousins' technicals last season. It saved him from being suspended for the final game of the year. With five before December hits, it's reasonable to believe Cousins might again face suspension. So for no other reason than preserving his court time, it'd make sense to protest the technical if the Kings believe it was undeserved.

But the Kings apparently don't think it was undeserved, and I'm OK with that.

I'm sort of in the middle here — I see both sides. I think in some ways it's destructive for the Kings to allow Cousins to be his own martyr. You know how sometimes someone is really angry at something, and you can step in to express your own anger at that same thing, and maybe you go a little over the top and steal some of that emotion from the original angry person, and they calm down because, hey, someone has their back? I feel like the Kings could be doing that: Petrie can be the bad guy when it comes to the league office. He could be the one fighting for Cousins, fighting the technicals, fighting that weird two-game suspension. Don't let Cousins be the martyr: take that mantle from him, and cool him off in the process.

Instead, the Kings are letting Cousins learn his own lessons … and I think that strategy is fine, too. I mean, Cousins is 22. He has a good agent to advocate on his behalf. And he admittedly talks to the refs WAY too much. He needs to calm it down a lot. Only he can do that. So letting him boil over now and realize his own messes will need to be cleaned by himself — that could work. It's not the angle I'd take, but it could work. I see the reasoning.

Assuming, of course, that it's reasoning and not just classic Petrie avoidance.