After the Toronto Raptors’ Game 7 win over the Indiana Pacers in the first round of last season’s playoffs, DeMar DeRozan was asked about taking so many shots.
He had scored 30 points in the win, but on 32 heaves. How did he keep shooting on a night when his shot wasn’t falling?
Kyle Lowry, sitting next to him on the podium, jumped in.
“He was going to empty the clip,” Lowry said, a grin on his face. “I don’t care if he shot 40 times, he emptied the clip.”
Lowry said he just wanted his backcourt mate to keep firing. If he took 32 shots and the Raptors lost, “he can live with that, and I can live with that, too.”
Somewhere, Dwane Casey must have winced a little.
Seldom do you hear a repudiation of what we think of as the modern NBA any more directly that what the Toronto guards said that night. In a league that increasingly prizes scoring efficiency — three-point shots and close-range two-point shots — Lowry was advocating a commitment to DeRozan’s long-range two-pointers, even on a night when they weren’t going down.
And yet, a few months later, with DeRozan on a torrid scoring pace to open the season, it’s worth asking: Has he officially become the exception to the NBA rule?
First, the caveat: probably not. It is only seven games into the season, too small a sample to be statistically meaningful. But if nothing else, those games show that DeRozan, with his new, $139-million contract in hand, looks set to be the same type of player he has always been. So far at least, he’s just a much better version of it.
After Wednesday night’s win over Oklahoma City, in which DeRozan scored 37 points to out-gun Russell Westbrook’s 36, the Toronto guard is averaging 34.1 points per game, three points better than Westbrook for the NBA lead. Last year, DeRozan scored 23.5 points per game, which was a career best.
More surprising, though, is that DeRozan is shooting 53.3% in this early season; last year he was at 44.6%, which was his best number other than his rookie season, when he was a small part of the Raptors offence. Heading into the offseason, when he would have been one of the most prized free agents on the market had he ever really made it to market, DeRozan had established himself as an inefficient scorer from the field who made up for it with volume, and by getting to the free-throw line a lot. When he signed the huge deal to return to Toronto, the question was whether he would spend the next phase of his career refining his game, or sticking with what got him all that money.
So far, he is doubling down. Last season, the biggest knock on his game was that DeRozan took so many mid-range jumpers: Almost a quarter of his field-goal attempts where in the 15- to 19-foot distance, and he shot 39% on those. In Toronto’s harder-than-expected playoff run, he took many more mid-range jumpers (38% of his shots from that distance) and made fewer (37%).
This season, 31% of DeRozan’s shots are between 15 and 19 feet, but he has made an absurd 51% of them. Meanwhile, fully 73% of his shot attempts have come under what the NBA’s charting data considers tight defence, with an opponent less than four feet away. So, as long as DeRozan keeps draining 50% of his shots with a defender in his face, he should have no problem keeping up this pace.
What is more meaningful about his start, though, is not DeRozan’s impressive scoring totals but what it might portend about the Raptors’ next playoff run. The caveats still apply — have we mentioned that it’s early? — but instead of spreading the offence around more, Toronto is going to DeRozan more than ever; he’s averaging 24.1 field-goal attempts this season, up from a career-high 17.7 last season. No one in the NBA has taken more shots per game than DeRozan. And only 1.7 of those attempts per game have come from behind the three-point line, a slight uptick from his career average of 1.4. Considering that DeRozan is just 2-for-12 from that range it doesn’t look like he’s suddenly going to morph into Klay Thompson.
All of which means the Raptors will likely get to the spring wondering which DeRozan they will get: the one who sinks everything, or the one who can’t make a shot. If they get the version that’s closer to the former than the latter, then the next playoff run shouldn’t be quite so angsty.
But if this young season has shown Raptors fans anything, it’s that DeRozan has brought plenty of ammo.