A push DeRozan doesn’t need
In some ways, DeMar DeRozan’s outward bitterness regarding his exile to San Antonio is another piece of a seismic trade that’s breaking in Masai Ujiri’s favour.
For years in Toronto, the evidence suggested no big-name player would ever stay.
It’s an awfully nice endorsement of the place, 20-plus years since its establishment as an NBA market, that a four-time all-star is carrying on so bitterly about being made to leave.
Not that you don’t feel for a clearly heartbroken DeRozan; he’s an all-time sporting citizen of the city whose No. 10 will one day reside in the rafters.
And certainly you can understand how he might come to the conclusion that he was done wrong by the Raptors when the club traded him to the Spurs last week in a deal that brought forward Kawhi Leonard and guard Danny Green to Toronto.
The all-time leading scorer in franchise history clearly felt he’d done everything he’d been asked to do during his nine seasons with the team, and he largely had.
But perhaps it’s good that he’s getting back to the solace of a gym here in Sin City this week, where he’s expected to be among the participants at a U.S. national team minicamp presided over by his new coach, Gregg Popovich.
A grinder by nature, DeRozan has always used the gym as a source of solace.
He certainly seems to be a man in desperate search of some, following up a bitter social-media post in the wake of the deal with an interview with ESPN in which he continued to beef about the circumstances of his dealing.
“I felt like I wasn’t treated, with what I sacrificed for nine years, with the respect that I thought I deserved,” DeRozan told ESPN’s Chris Haynes. “By just giving me the say so of letting me know something’s going on or it’s a chance. That’s all I wanted. That’s all I wanted. I’m not saying, ‘You don’t have to trade me’ or ... just let me know something is going on because I sacrificed everything.”
DeRozan is understandably looking for someone to blame, but there’s nobody culpable. As the old sporting saying goes, the great Wayne Gretzky was traded. To get more basketballspecific, ditto Kareem AbdulJabbar and Wilt Chamberlain and Oscar Robertson, three of the top handful of players to ever grace an NBA floor.
DeRozan, if we’re reading it right, is upset Ujiri, the team president, wasn’t more transparent. The two had met here in Las Vegas at the NBA’s summer league days before the deal was done.
But no matter what was said between them in that short back-and-forth — and Ujiri has acknowledged a “miscommunication” — it’s unrealistic to argue DeRozan should have been kept better informed on the progress of trade talks. Executives aren’t doing their jobs if they’re not exploring every theoretical avenue to make their team better. They’re also not doing their jobs if they offer blow-by-blow updates of those explorations with the players involved.
“I’m going to start from the bottom, to show why I’ve been the player I’ve been.” DEMAR DEROZAN ON STARTING OVER
Trade talks, after all, almost always lead to a dead end. Smart GMs don’t take their players along for those rides. It’s just not productive.
Imagine if a DeRozan-Leonard deal would have fallen through at the 11th hour and DeRozan was fully informed of how gamely the Raptors tried to move him. It’s one thing to have alienated DeRozan now that he’s on San Antonio’s roster. It’d be a real problem if he remained a Raptor. No GM would trade DeRozan the person; he’s as low-maintenance an all-star as you’ll ever find living on mega-millionaire’s row. As for DeRozan the player? DeRozan called the reasoning behind the trade “B.S.” But any reasonable observer would call it a home-run swing at the possibility of unprecedented progress. If Leonard and Green turn out to be healthy — a considerable “if,” no matter that both passed physicals in Toronto — the deal charts the most plausible path to the NBA final in franchise history.
Leonard is not expected to be in action at this week’s minicamp — which, after a Wednesday team meeting, continued with practices Thursday and Friday — and it’s not hard to fathom why. Given that Leon- ard spent most of last season refusing to play and practise under Popovich in San Antonio, why would he change tack now? Given that other highprofile stars have bowed out, among them LeBron James and Steph Curry, attendance is apparently not mandatory.
Raptors guard Kyle Lowry, DeRozan’s long-time fellow all-star, is expected to be here.
ESPN reported on Wednesday that DeRozan has withdrawn from participating in Basketball Without Borders and the NBA’s Africa game, a not-so-thinly veiled jab at Ujiri, who holds those events dear. Fair enough.
But if DeRozan is in search of the actual reason he was traded and he’s being honest with himself, he’ll stop with the blame game and consult the video of his personal lowlight reel of playoff shortcomings, which are inextricably linked to Toronto’s biggest disappointments of the past five seasons. To DeRozan’s credit, given his status as one of the great self-improvers of his era, it sounds as though he’s already headed in that direction.
“Just this whole transition of making this move, it kind of makes you look back at your career in the sense of what points you could’ve been better at, how you could have been better at it, the success that you had, the failures that you had,” DeRozan told ESPN.
“And you kind of accumulate all that into a ball of motivation and hunger and kind of frustration, on top of this situation happening. I’m going to start from the bottom, to show why I’ve been the player I’ve been, but this time, with a whole different level of ‘I don’t care about nothing else.’”
That’s the DeRozan Toronto has come to know and love, and the rabid professionalism that will be missed in his absence, no matter what happens from here.