Snubbed but loved
Underappreciated around the league, Derozan looks like perfect fit in S.A.
The bright side of the snub is that Demar Derozan didn’t need another hassle. He’s taking his time with his grief now, and the last couple of months have been hard enough.
This way, when All-star weekend comes, he won’t have to worry about more flights, more check-ins, more protocols, more potential contacts to trace. Given their druthers, at least a couple of his should-be peers bound for Atlanta would just as soon skip it all, too.
Still, the lack of an invitation stung. Everybody wants respect, especially when it’s so thoroughly merited.
No team with a better record than the Spurs got shut out of next week’s scaled-down All-star festivities, and no player left at home has contributed as much to winning as Derozan has.
Maybe people around the league don’t notice him the way they used to, and maybe in a weird way that’s a tribute to how well he’s integrated himself into his new role. His production is sneaking up on people the same way
the Spurs do, and if you don’t watch him every night you might not realize how he makes the whole thing go.
At the moment, it would be fair to say that what Derozan has to offer is valued more in San Antonio than it is anywhere else.
And this summer? The same thing might be true then, too.
Should that come to pass, it would qualify as a bit of an upset. From the moment Derozan came to tearful terms with his trade from Toronto in 2018, his era with the Spurs had the look of a placeholder between the glory days and the next generation. He fit neatly into neither.
But the more he’s stuck around, the more he’s grown on a system. And the more a system has grown on him, the more Derozan looks like he can be part of the Spurs’ future.
He is not, and never has been, the superstar a franchise builds around. But he still can be the best player on a winning team, and just as importantly he can be a guy who understands how to coexist with kids destined to take control of the team from him.
This is not an easy dynamic to pull off, but Derozan is doing it.
Even while dealing with everything associated with the declining health of his father, who died last week, he’s had one of the best all-around seasons of his career. Little by little, he’s putting Dejounte Murray, Derrick White and Keldon Johnson in position to emerge as stars, while serving as the go-to guy every time the Spurs need him to.
Presumably, they’ll need that from him less often in the coming years. But that doesn’t mean he needs to leave.
Part of this, as usual, has to do with economics and with the details of the free agent market. If the Spurs let all four of their veterans with expiring contracts walk away this summer, they could free up more than $50 million in salary cap space. But aside from taking a long-shot run at a young (and widely coveted) big man like Atlanta’s John Collins, there are few obvious free-agent candidates to target with that money.
So while it might be a practical decision to part ways with Lamarcus Aldridge, considering how his numbers have fallen as the Spurs have embraced a style that isn’t his strong suit, wouldn’t a new deal with Derozan at least be worth considering?
And even if it’s less than the $27.7 million per year he’s making now, wouldn’t the Spurs be as likely to pay him as any team would be?
That sure seems more plausible now than it did a year or two ago, mostly because of how good Derozan has been.
The Spurs aren’t going to sign him to the kind of huge deal that would prevent them from extending building blocks like Johnson, or from adding complementary pieces when possible. But if they have the money to spend for the next year or two, they could do much worse than offering Derozan a chunk of it.
They might not have seen this coming when they traded for him. Derozan probably didn’t either. But after the longest postseason streak in professional sports ended and Gregg Popovich dove headlong into yet another stylistic makeover, it’s become clear that Derozan and the Spurs might be perfect for each other after all.
And if the rest of the league can’t see all Derozan has to offer?
The Spurs can see the bright side in that, too.