But they will have missed a golden opportunity to maximize his impact. Should the club fail to re-sign Lowry, DeRozan will still be a good player. And he has clearly had a positive effect on DeRozan's game. The Raptors have transformed themselves into a gritty, unselfish team in 2013-14, and that collective personality is a reflection of Lowry. Not only is Lowry important to the team's performance, he is critical to DeRozan's development. If Toronto is serious about building on this encouraging season, they have no choice but the re-sign their starting point guard. He is not nearly the playmaker he has shown to be this season when his backcourt partner is out of the game. Tellingly, DeRozan's assist numbers actually go down when Lowry is on the bench. And he has done exactly that, improving his defense and passing.ĭeRozan is getting assists at a career-high rate while rarely turning the ball over -a critical combination:ĭeRozan with Lowry on court vs. So where is this breakout season coming from? DeRozan is posting career highs in both player efficiency rating (PER) and win shares per 48 minutes, but he is not shooting the ball better.įor a player like DeRozan -a shooting guard who can't hit the three -it is important to develop an all-around game to compensate. I’m trying to figure out ways to beat guys like that. I kind of struggled with that early in my career. He weighed in on the pressure of being the team's number one scoring option following a March 2 win against the Golden State Warriors, per the National Post's Eric Koreen:Ī lot of people don’t understand how tough it really is night in and night out when a team is throwing its best defender at you, denying you the ball, trying to. In fact, DeRozan's overall field-goal percentage has dropped from 44.5 percent in 2012-13 to 43.4 percent as the young guard has once again needed to adapt to facing the opponent's best perimeter defender on a nightly basis. Contrary to predictions, DeRozan's scoring has jumped since Gay was shipped off to Sacramento, particularly from an efficiency standpoint. He averaged 21.3 points per game on 43.4 percent shooting in the 18 games before the trade, and 23.6 points on 43.5 percent shooting in the 39 games since. He’s only 23, but DeRozan has never had a league-average PER, and the chances he lives up to this deal are slim.īut DeRozan has quieted the critics this season. He’s a minus defender both on the ball (opponents shot better than 50 percent on isolation attempts last season, according to Synergy Sports) and not a particularly attentive helper off it. He has never shown even average creativity or timing as a passer, and Dwane Casey cut down on DeRozan’s pick-and-roll usage as soon as he got the Raptors head-coaching job. He’s a low-percentage shooter who can’t shoot 3s, and thus can’t space the floor on the wing. The trope is that “advanced statistics” frown on DeRozan, but the truth is that very few statistics of any kind paint him as a productive player. Former Raptors general manager Bryan Colangelo made a pair of counter-intuitive moves during the 2012-13 season by first signing DeRozan to a four-year contract extension and then trading for such a redundant player in Gay.Īt the time of the extension, Grantland's Zach Lowe panned the deal: Though he averaged at least 16.5 points per game over his last three seasons, DeMar DeRozan was often viewed as a selfish, one-dimensional player, a shooting guard with limited shooting range.Ĭoming into the 2013-14 season, his potential was being hampered by Rudy Gay, another volume scorer who struggled from beyond the arc. Can DeRozan's breakout season be attributed, at least in part, to Lowry? This isn't DeRozan's first season playing with Lowry, but the fact that the rise in his play has coincided so perfectly with that of his point guard is intriguing. It's not that DeRozan was undeserving (he was certainly better than Joe Johnson), but he had the benefit of being a popular homegrown player, unlike Lowry. That honor goes to point guard Kyle Lowry, who was left off the All-Star team in what was by far the biggest snub in the Eastern Conference this season. Unlike Carter, however, DeRozan isn't the consensus best player on his own team this season. Now, Toronto is on the path to the franchise's first division title since 2007, and DeRozan was the first Raptor's guard named to the NBA All-Star team since Vince Carter.
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