The first round of NBA All-Star game voting results came out yesterday, and a subject of much discussion was the relative rankings of the Raptors back court. With DeMar DeRozan in third place behind Dwayne Wade and Kyrie Irving, there’s certainly a case to be made that he should at least be ahead of Wade, especially given his early season scoring outbursts. DeRozan has shown an improvement in his playmaking, and his shooting with any semblance of space has been nothing short of impressive. His fellow Olympian on the Raptors roster however, Kyle Lowry, sits all the way down in 6th place among Eastern Conference guards, just behind Derrick Rose. While DeMar might have a case for a small slight with Wade ahead of him on legacy votes and the larger market, Lowry might be the best guard in the Eastern Conference this season (and in my opinion definitely is), and surely should sit higher.
Before we get into the debate here, I don’t believe the All-Star game voting is something that’s usually worth getting worked up about. It’s an exhibition game, and it’s voted by the fans. Lowry plays in Canada, and the team doesn’t have the fan base of the large market teams in the States. However, these things do affect legacies, and hall of fame chances, and Lowry was a late bloomer so he might need as many things going in his favor as possible when he does retire to make that case. As well, he’s a free agent this summer, and he can’t be feeling the love from Canadian fans after being 10th in MVP voting a season ago (voted by media), now having half the votes of his teammate (voted by fans).
As far as Lowry and DeRozan, and the question of who’s the better player, I’m not sure this is a debate we should even have. After all, we have both players, and they’re teammates, so why even entertain this discussion? Why not recognize their greatness side by side and simply appreciate both? The easy answer here is that we don’t appear to be fulfilling this, given that Lowry has half the votes of DeRozan currently. The more complicated answer is that the numbers, other than raw points scored, all point to Lowry as the larger influence on the team’s success, and we might be shortchanging his greatness by equating the two. That isn’t intended as a shot at DeRozan either, who’s made me a fan this year through his improvements, and while I could speak to the further growth I’d like to see in DeMar, I truly believe he’s taken a step forward this year as a star in this league.
Without getting away from the point of the article, maybe that’s the true complication here, the fact that most fans have taken sides in this debate in either looking at the advanced stats and how much they favor Lowry, or looking at the way DeRozan has come up and improved as a Raptor and is the more impressive scorer (whether he’s the more effective scorer is up for debate, but the degree of difficulty with which he manages to score is definitely more aesthetically impressive), and we’ve set into our opinions. It’s human nature to compare and contrast, and to want to rank whether or not it’s in our best interest to do so. Whether any of us want to admit it, we’ve likely established a hierarchy in the back of our minds, and we interpret things through those filters.
While DeRozan’s presence on the team is certainly critical to the things the Raptors do, in that he gives the team another dominant ball handler to take some of the pressure off of Lowry, and allow Kyle to play off-ball at times to take advantage of his catch and shoot game, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that Lowry simply is the engine that makes this team run. His on/off statistics are once again this year astounding, and DeRozan’s are somewhat perplexing. The team has a +11.2 net rating when Lowry is on the floor, versus a -2.3 net rating when he’s off, and for DeRozan those numbers are +4.3 on and +18.5 off. This isn’t the whole story, I’m well aware, especially because of the incredible dominance of the Lowry and the bench lineup, and the argument has long been that this unit is so dominant because they play against opposing benches. While this argument probably isn’t completely without merit, applying it to the debate over the best player on the team doesn’t totally work, because it implies that DeRozan doesn’t play with the other members of the Lowry and the bench group (he does), and also implies that DeRozan doesn’t also have stretches where he plays against opposing benches (which he also does).
Once again, and I feel like I have to belabor this point because I’m not intending to start a civil war in the Raptors fan base here, this isn’t to demean DeRozan, because his presence is definitely a large part of what allows Lowry to play his game and be who he is, and the team doesn’t get where they are without either player. It just serves as a reminder sometimes that when we credit the difference in their on/off net ratings to Lowry’s brilliance, we need to also credit Lowry with said brilliance, and keep that in mind beyond the base statistics of points on the scoreboard. The team runs through, and because of, Kyle Lowry, and while he didn’t come up in the Raptors system, and perhaps that’s why DeRozan is at times the more beloved player, he certainly came into his own here.
In this age of incredible physical specimens in the NBA, sometimes it’s hard to see a player with Lowry’s stature as dominant. He doesn’t have the stature of LeBron, or the wingspan of Giannis, or the explosiveness of Westbrook. It doesn’t seem to be in his nature to force his own game, instead preferring to pick his spots as the team needs him, such as the fourth quarter against the Jazz last night. Perhaps if he simply imposed his will on the game we’d view him as a greater player and recognize his dominance more, but if he did that, maybe the relationship between Lowry and DeRozan wouldn’t work as well as it does, and there’d be little left for the rest of the team.
So appreciate DeRozan. Appreciate a player who’s put in the work, and continues to do so, and we’ve seen grow so much over the past 7 years in the league. Appreciate his love for the city and the fans, and his commitment to growing both his own game and the team here. Don’t lose track of how valuable and incredible that is for the city, the fans and the team. But while we all need to do that, and I’m as guilty as anyone of losing track of that at times, we also need to remember that the other guy in the back court was an MVP candidate last year, was recognized around the league as one of the most important players in the entire conference, and earned an All-NBA berth in the process. This team is simply far better when Lowry is on the court, and that seems to apply over the past several seasons almost entirely regardless of the other players on the court.
At the end of the day, for me at least, that’s where the argument between the two seems to end. When Lowry plays without DeRozan, the team succeeds. DeRozan’s bigger detractors will say the team succeeds more with Lowry and without DeRozan, but that’s not the whole story either, because there’s a case that without DeRozan, Lowry would simply have to carry too much of the load and wouldn’t be able to maintain the same level of play. On the other hand, when DeRozan plays without Lowry, the team struggles. Not just defensively, which has never been DeMar’s calling card, but also with the ball. I’ve always been critical of DeRozan’s shortcomings, but I’ve come to accept that DeMar is a great running mate for Kyle and they make each other better. That being said, there’s no question in my mind who the greater player between the two is, and it’d be a mistake to let appreciation for DeMar blind you from the greatness of Lowry.
