Everyone is surprised by what he’s doing, he says, but him. Nobody saw this coming, he says, but him.
Maybe the most disbelieving part of this wondrous season being delivered by DeMar DeRozan might be just that: That he was somehow this basketball Nostradamus who peeked into the future and is among the few who aren’t taken aback by what we’re all witnessing.
DeRozan, you see, has done everything imaginable, hitting game-winners, taking ownership of fourth quarters, going on 30-piece scoring binges like nobody in Chicago since Michael Jordan, raising the hopes of a city and pushing himself into what surely will be a top-five finish in the Kia MVP voting. Everything, except place his hand on a Bible and admit the truth.
“I never try to limit my imagination, my thought process, my options, my opportunities,” DeRozan said.
He actually isn’t floored by this? If so, that might be his most impressive feat.
In short order, DeRozan’s performance is suddenly and drastically next-level here in his 13th season. He’s still poking a finger in the eye of the analytics geeks by glorifying the mid-range shot, and he’s tied for fourth in the league in scoring at 28.2 points per game. And, he has the Bulls positioned for what could be a deep playoff run come spring.
Despite enjoying a very respectable career to this point, his journey has taken a sharp uptick here at age 32, and good luck finding another player who waited this late to do this much.
“I don’t know what roll I’m on,” he said. “I’m just being myself.”
When he signed a three-year, $85 million free agent deal last summer, the buzz in NBA circles was that the Bulls overpaid. There were feelers from the hometown Lakers — they must now regret failing to do more than kick his tires — and mild-to-medium interest elsewhere. DeRozan was about to join his third team, and at his last stop, San Antonio, he seemingly climbed about as high as he could. At least, that was the perception from the outside.
The ultimate compliment a player can receive is being labeled as clutch, and that’s a well-earned designation by DeRozan. He leads the NBA in fourth-quarter points and doesn’t shrink in the moment (he’s No. 2 in the NBA in clutch scoring this season). On the contrary, he gravitates toward pressure, the ball and the chance to be a hero.
“When you’re in those moments you gotta take it on,” DeRozan said. “I love the moments. I love the challenge. I love the opportunity. It’s fun to me.”
In February, he averaged 34.2 ppg on 55.3% shooting and nobody has scored 35 or more points over a longer stretch of games while also shooting 50% in each of those contests.
“We’re witnessing history,” Bulls rookie Ayo Dosunmu said. “What we are witnessing right now is something people are going to remember for a long time.”
This is satisfying to DeRozan on a number of levels, mainly because he has another chance to compete for that slippery championship if everything goes right.
DeRozan, as you know, was unceremoniously shipped out of Toronto in 2018 for Kawhi Leonard after giving his all for the Raptors. The next season, he had to watch as Leonard parachuted in, raised the trophy and claimed the moment, the parade and the euphoria that, in a more compassionate world, would’ve belonged to DeRozan.
When the Raptors’ courtside celebrity fan, Drake, sang the line “and my city love me like DeMar DeRozan” on the hit record Lemon Pepper Freestyle, it was a verse that rang so true. Toronto embraced DeRozan and he squeezed back, only twice as hard. So you could imagine the angst caused by the separation and the subsequent Missed Opportunity for perhaps the most popular player in franchise history.
Basketball is funny sometimes, though, and so DeRozan finds himself in a somewhat similar situation because the City Of Big Shoulders is offering a soft one for him. There’s a kinship developing and strengthening between Chicago and DeRozan so quickly here in Year One of their relationship because they discovered a need for one another.
“I wasn’t going just to (come here and) wear a Chicago Bulls jersey and try to get some free Jordans,” he said in revealing his goal in signing with the Bulls. “We (were) going to go and make something happen.”
The beauty of what DeRozan is doing is that he refused to change his game. While the rest of the league became drunk on 3-point shooting, and a fair segment of general managers swayed by statistics and data began sneering at anyone who refused to go along with the trend, DeRozan stayed true to who and what he was.
“The tempo of the game has changed,” he said. “The physicality, the skillfulness of the game has reached a whole new level, and that’s just a credit to the talent that’s coming in and out of this league consistently over the last X amount of years.
“But I’m still me.”
More than anyone with the exception of Stephen Curry, DeRozan is defined by his signature shot: a 15-to-20 footer that seems weird because almost nobody is copying it. By feasting on mid-range shots, DeRozan seems romantically stuck in a previous era — when that shot actually made sense, when that shot was considered the best shot, when that shot won games, when everyone shot that shot.
That shot has suddenly been shot down, not only by the NBA, but in college and youth leagues where impressionable kids are being told by their teachers that you can’t make the league if you don’t shoot the 3.
Then you see DeRozan, instinctively locating his sweet spot on the floor, going iso on his man, squaring up with a dribble or two, maybe issuing a pump fake, elevating and softly letting it fly, looking totally out of place. It’s not that DeRozan can’t or won’t try deep shots — he has won games during this magical season with 3s after all. He just doesn’t seek to stray from his meal ticket to become a volume 3-point shooter all of a sudden. And it speaks to his astonishing efficiency; DeRozan is shooting 51%; only Giannis Antetokounmpo and LeBron James are more accurate among the league’s top 10 scorers.
It does make you wonder: If DeRozan can command a large salary that gives him generational wealth, and be an All-Star, and thrive here in the latter stages of his career with that shot, why won’t others adopt it? Why do players and teams refuse to even practice it?
His best season before this one, at least from a scoring standpoint, was 2016-17 in Toronto, when he averaged 27.3 ppg — and that was an aberration in itself, because it was four points higher than any average until now.
At his best, DeRozan was an annual All-Star, though often deemed shy of the greatness associated with being a franchise player since he made only two All-NBA teams (the second team in 2017-18 and the third team in 2016-17).
His nine seasons in Toronto defined him and gave him his identity. It made him best buddies with backcourt mate Kyle Lowry and saw him serve as the heart (or the soul, depending on which one Lowry claimed) of the team he helped lead on five playoff runs.
Which brings us to that sore subject: DeRozan was very good in the playoffs, but his lack of 3-point shooting hurt at times (he shot 19.7% from deep his final 40 playoff games with the Raptors). Ultimately, he was not good enough for team president Masai Ujiri, who felt Toronto needed to look elsewhere for a star.
Never mind that the Raptors, during those playoff trips, had to go through prime LeBron James, who tortured and essentially owned the club (“LeBronto” was the wisecracking nickname then). Ujiri felt the Raptors had gone as far as they possibly could with the DeRozan-Lowry tandem. He bravely pulled the plug when a chance to get Kawhi materialized.
Lowry wasn’t happy with the trade initially, DeRozan was crushed … and as it turned out, Ujiri made the right decision, uncomfortable as it was.
Ever the introspective sort, DeRozan has made peace, and said this of the last few years:
“There were a lot of those ‘looking in the mirror’ moments and understanding a lot of things,” DeRozan said. “This moment now is just me being at a complete balance of life, content, comfortable. It’s me understanding, the most I’ve understood in my life, to just be balanced.”
Yes, that’s all in the rear view, because something special is bubbling with the Bulls.
They finished 11th in the East last season and now, with DeRozan, are penthouse fixtures in the East. DeRozan has blended harmoniously with fellow All-Star guard Zach LaVine, who respects his new co-star so much that he didn’t chafe when DeRozan took the fourth-quarter responsibility from him.
It’s all working out well, all falling into place for DeRozan to change the conversation about his career and his place in the game.
“No matter how many points I score or what I do in a game,” he said, “my goal is always to win.”
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Shaun Powell has covered the NBA for more than 25 years. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on Twitter.
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