Two years ago, there was some debate over who was the best player on the Toronto Raptors: Kyle Lowry or DeMar DeRozan. The scales usually tipped in favour of Lowry, but DeRozan’s youth, membership in the Team USA fraternity and All-Star bona fides at least made the case compelling.
Not anymore. Kyle Lowry has broken away from the 1a and 1b deadlock and cemented himself as the clear number 1, pushing DeRozan to number 2 and creating all sorts of issues for the Raptors today and going forward.
As of Friday morning, the Raptors sport a plus-7.0 point differential when Lowry is on the floor and minus-6.3 differential when he leaves it (versus DeRozan’s plus-4.1 and plus-1.5). Lowry is leading the team with a 23.3 PER and has a True Shooting Percentage of 57.4%. DeRozan’s numbers are a respectable 20.0 PER and 52.8 TS%, but both are very much a notch below Lowry’s output.
Then there is the fact that Lowry is a better playmaker, a better three-point shooter, and that he takes most of his shots at the rim or from behind the arc while DeRozan still likes to live in the mid-range (47% of DeRozan’s shots come between 10ft. and the three-point line versus 17% for Lowry). Then there are those weird eye-test things, like the feeling that Lowry is more effective in those ‘the team really needs a basket right now’ scenarios. Lowry thrives in those situations, whereas DeRozan just gets visibly frustrated when he or the team hasn’t scored in a while.
In seven months, though, the Raptors are going to sign DeRozan to a MASSIVE new contract. It’s as close to a certainty as I think there has ever been in Raptors’ free agency. He loves Toronto, Masai Ujiri was pimping DeRozan as a cornerstone in all his free agent pitches this summer, and the Raptors aren’t really in a position to just let him walk since they have no one in the pipeline to replace him. Plus, DeRozan is a very popular guy with players around the league, and cutting him loose – after all he’s done to attach himself to Toronto – would look very bad on a franchise still looking for a toe-hold in free agency respectability.
That means a) that the Raptors aren’t going to trade DeRozan, and b) that they aren’t going to sideline him or lessen his role. Given the financial commitment that is in the pipeline, the team has to begin crafting the narrative that he’s a player that they can’t afford t let go in order to help fans (and MLSE) swallow the cap hit DeRozan’s salary is going make.
They are also not going to suddenly push Jonas Valanciunas ahead of him in the pecking order, no matter how efficiently he scores (aside: let’s remember that part of what makes Valanciunas so efficient is that the team tries to only give him the ball when he’s earned deep post position because there is a very narrow window in which he can score effectively. Part of what keeps him looking good is the team’s diligence in not giving him a longer leash on offence). DeRozan may be worse than Lowry, and some may feel he’s in danger of being surpassed by Valanciunas, but his role and position on these Raptors is basically ensured, and that is going to start causing more and more problems for this club going forward.
First of all, DeRozan is a high-usage player. Higher than anyone on the roster. For someone with such a shaky offensive approach that generally means that he’s preventing the team from utilizing a more efficient option several times per game. Besides his lack of three-point shooting talent, he also rarely looks to go to the rim, with only 18% of his shot attempts coming within 3ft. of the basket, which is good for 10th on the team and 7th amongst rotation players. DeRozan is a really nice finisher around the rim, but he doesn’t have the handles or the first step needed to routinely attack the basket off of the dribble. Often when he tries the defence looks to swarm him, and they usually have the time to because he’s not that quick with the ball in his hands.
Which speaks to another issue: passing. His uptick in assists this season (a solid 4.5 per game) should not be taken as a sign that he is a quicker or more decisive passer. DeRozan is still a heartbreaking ball-stopper. When he gets a touch the offence is almost guaranteed to grind to a halt while he hunts for a mid-range shot (or hunts for a foul, which can be a blessing and a curse depending on how the refs are calling the game). What DeRozan has gotten much better at is passing out of trouble as a last resort, finding the open man when he’s been penned-in, and that’s why his assists have catapulted to a career-high per game. However, those passes are emergency finds, they aren’t passes that are keeping the ball hopping or the defence shifting. They are coming when he’s been bottled up and he needs an outlet. While it’s better that he can make that pass than the alternative, what would really help his team is if his passes would come more in the flow, but that’s now how DeRozan is wired. DeRozan is not a selfish player, he just doesn’t see the game that way.
DeRozan doesn’t see the game like the great facilitating shooting guards. He’s not James Harden. He’s not Andre Iguodala. He’s not Manu Ginobili. When he gets the ball he believes that the best thing he can do is probe for a shot. He’s a good offensive player, but he’s not good enough to abort ball-movement to go one-on-one so often. Going back to that team-leading usage, that means that he’s got the ball in his hands a lot and he doesn’t have the playmaking skills to capitalize on the defensive attention that he creates. Going back to the fact that this team is going to go all-in on him regardless, it’s hard to see how the club is going to make all of this work.
Keep in mind, Lowry and Valanciunas are also guys that need a lot of time to isolate to play the way that they want to play. The difference is that both guys get shots from more efficient spots on the floor, and neither one handcuffs the offence in quite the same way as DeRozan. Nonetheless, having three guys that need that kind of time with the ball is non-ideal, especially for a team prone to offensive droughts at the start and end of games. If you’re not going to let DeRozan play his game, though, which basically boils down to hunting for fouls on jump shots at the expense of ball movement, what are you really going to do with him? He’s not going to start hitting threes and he doesn’t have the feel to be a playmaker for others, so what else could one expect him to do? The Raptors appear committed to keeping him around, so they’re going to have to find something out.
I know that there is a chorus that says that none of that non-basketball stuff matters and that the Raptors cannot sign DeRozan to a max deal next summer, but the non-basketball stuff matters a great deal, and will dictate his signing as much as anything. He may be the team’s first drafted-and-groomed All-Star that wants to stay in Toronto beyond his second contract. That’s unprecedented. He’s also a massive advocate for the city, both within Toronto and outside of it, which has done a tremendous service to the perception of the organization in NBA circles. Severing ties with him would have ripple effects. Free agents are becoming more attuned to the ‘quality’ and ‘culture’ of organizations. One’s where the drama is low and the loyalty is high. Stuff like that helps lure Greg Monroe to Milwaukee and LaMarcus Aldridge to San Antonio. DeRozan doesn’t help on the court as much as his role would imply that he does, but he helps tremendously off of the court, and so the team has to make peace with his foibles and learn to work around them better given the position DeRoan has put them in.
Of course you could make an argument that any team that has DeRozan in so prominent a place in the pecking order (and eating a large part of one’s salary cap) will never be a threat to go deep in the Playoffs, and I wouldn’t be inclined to try and talk you out of that stance. DeRozan is an easy player to game plan for, especially when you have the time that the Playoffs afford you, but not even that fact is likely to dissuade the organization about his future within it DeRozan has the Raptors penned into a very uncomfortable place, a place where they can’t afford to lose him but, in all ways save financially, can’t really afford to keep him, either.
The one hope is that Ujiri is not done with this roster. He began tuning it to Dwane Casey’s needs and looking at its current makeup you must conclude that he’s not done with it this season. The gaping hole at power forward, the lack of offensive weapons off of the bench and the dearth of three-point threats have already begun to hamstring Casey’s rotation. Perhaps Ujiri can find assets via trade that will help mitigate the problems that DeRozan introduces to the game, rounding out the roster and making all the pieces fit together more effectively.
Or, rather, Ujiri must find assets that help mitigate those problems because those problems aren’t going away otherwise. And if he’s months away from making DeRozan the highest paid player in Raptors history, he’s going to want to find those assets sooner rather than later.
