Men's League Basketball Action with Former Kentucky Wildcat DeMarcus Cousins

One of the advantages of living in a major college hoops town during the current NBA lockout is the chance to run into many of the former stars of your program around town as they work out in the hopes that the league will start back up relatively soon.

Sure, it's not like most of us will get the chance to get any run in with those guys, but it's nice to run into a Tayshaun Prince every once in a while when you're taking your wife out for dinner.

It's gives you a pretty good story to tell to your buddies, but that is all.

Well imagine my surprise last night when I rolled into the gym for the first game in my men's league at Christ the King here in Lexington and realized that the other team had brought in some ringers that were spending a little time here in central Kentucky.

I first knew we were in trouble when the only person warming up was none other than DeMarcus Cousins. Yep, the big fella himself.

Teaming up with Cousins were former Kentucky Wildcat Erik Daniels, former Wildcat Sheray Thomas and former DePaul Blue Devil and Lexington native George Baker. Needless to say, we were a little over-matched.

Now here's where I have to throw this little nugget in: DeMarcus Cousins could not have been any nicer or more pleasant. Daniels and the other guys were extremely friendly as well, but I want to specifically mention Cousins because he normally gets such a bad wrap from the media.

From the outset he came over and struck up the conversation with myself and some of the other guys on the team, he joined our team while both teams were warming up, he rebounded for us...basically he went out of his way to just be one of the guys all the while knowing we were probably eating it up. And he was right of course.

And let's just say that when the head official was going through the league rules on technicals there were more than a few jokes made about himself. Good times.

Anyways, back to the game, it was a blast and turned out to be a very interesting night. Obviously these guys would have killed us had they wanted to, and they were largely content with jacking up deep shots until it mattered. But we came to play to and I'm pretty sure that we shot about 70 percent from three point land. (In the video Cousins even references how well we shot. I was 6-for-8 from 3-point range myself.)

In fact, we not only had a halftime lead but at one point were up double figures.

But whenever we would stretch out a lead, Cousins would suddenly turn into Larry Bird. I swear, by the time it was all said and done he had to have hit at least 12 threes. And as impressive as that was, what was even more impressive was just how agile he was.

Yeah, he had a breathtaking reverse dunk that I can't even begin to describe, but on defense he would occasionally pick us up full court along with Daniels and their athleticism was just unbelievable.

Predictably, they ended up winning by seven points after outscoring us 10-3 over the last two minutes and I guess Cousins was the MVP of the game. But during the course of the game we heard enough "Damn these guys can shoot" to know that we at least had them thinking there was a chance we could win.

But the score really didn't matter. This was all about a really cool moment that almost nobody saw but that I will always remember. It was a night that reaffirmed the fact that even NBA players are just regular people as well when they are left alone from the autograph seekers and they are out of the spotlight.

Fifteen guys came together on a basketball floor at a little church gym in Lexington, Kentucky, and just played ball.

It was perfect.