TORONTO– DeMar DeRozan is having the best start by any player in the more than two decades of Toronto Raptors history.
Heading into the Raptors back-to-back against the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors beginning Tuesday it’s not LeBron James leading the NBA scoring or either of the Warriors combination of Steph Curry and Kevin Durant, but DeRozan with an average of 34 points a game. No Raptor has ever held that honour this far into a season. No Raptor has ever averaged more than the 27.6 Vince Carter put up in 2000-01.
Even in Chris Bosh’s and Carter’s best years, they didn’t put together an opening month like DeRozan is right now.
How rare is 34 points a game? Only five players have ever averaged more over an entire season. You may have heard of them: Wilt Chamberlain; Kareem Abdul Jabbar; Bob MacAdoo, Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant.
Heading into Monday night’s action, DeRozan led Anthony Davis of the New Orleans Pelicans—in second place with a 31-point average–by more than three points a night, or 10 per cent. That kind of gap is rare too, and has only happened twice in the past twenty years.
If DeRozan scores 30 against Cleveland it will be for the ninth time in 10 games. The only other player to do that to start a season was Chamberlain in 1961, the year he averaged an NBA record 50 points per game.
The question is how sustainable all of this is? Playing lights out for nine games is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s a long way from doing it over 82. And while DeRozan is a proven scorer it’s hard to imagine him improving on last year’s career-best 23.5 points a game by more than 10 points a night.
Still there are some signs that DeRozan is on more than a hot streak. New York Knicks head coach Jeff Hornacek played 13 NBA seasons alongside some of the most lethal scorers in the game, including Karl Malone, who is second in all-time points scored in the NBA. Hornacek watched DeRozan score 30 against the Knicks and saw a player under complete control.
“The game really looks slow to him,” Hornacek said. “He’s taking his sweet time, using his body. He’s got good size, good athletic ability. He gets an angle on his guy and turns around and shoots it, obviously in that mid-range game. He’s a hard guy to stop unless you try to double him or come from the weak side, and then he jumps up in the air and finds guys from there. That’s what makes him really dangerous.”
DeRozan has played nearly 18,000 minutes since his rookie campaign in 2009-10; only a handful of players have played more in that stretch. The NBA game is exceedingly familiar to him.
“I think it’s like being in your house in the dark, right? You turn the lights off and you still know where you’ve got to go,” said DeRozan, who seemingly loves coming up with metaphors as much as he loves breaking down defenders. “You know where the dining [room] table is, the chair, where the stairs are, all of that. I think at this point that’s what it feels like to me late in the game. I’m just used to it. I’m comfortable with it. And if I step on a toy or something I know I didn’t put it there.”
It helps that DeRozan has whittled his game down to the essentials. Other players try to expand their games; DeRozan seems intent on perfecting the tools he has. The lack of three-pointers in his approach is well known. It’s been expected that he would add that to his arsenal given the three-happy nature of today’s NBA, but DeRozan is taking the lowest percentage of his shots from three since his second year in the league. Every other player in the top-10 in scoring takes at least three triples a game other than big man Anthony Davis. DeRozan has taken 13 on the season.
Another area he’s getting to less? The rim.
He’s never taken a lower percentage of his shots from inside three feet. Last season about 22 per cent of his shots were lay-ups or some facsimile thereof. This season? Just 12 per cent.
“It’s going to come. I’m conscious of it. But sometimes it takes a toll on you,” he said. “Last year I was on the floor a lot, taking all that punishment early on. This year I’m going to feel my way in. It’s one thing I’m going to get to, eventually, but I didn’t want to pound it right away. I wanted to work on that in-between stuff and put my game together as the season goes on.”
What’s left is the area outside the paint and inside the three-point line—the mid-range– and DeRozan is exploiting it more than any player in the league.
More than 52 per cent of his shots are being taken between 10 and 19 feet, or an average of nearly 13 shots a game.
No one else is even close.
Russell Westbrook of the Oklahoma City Thunder takes 8.1 shots from that range while the Pelicans’ Davis takes 8. LaMarcus Aldridge if the San Antonio Spurs puts up 7.2 shots from the 10-19 range. Westbrook converts just 42 per cent of those shots; Davis 47 per cent while Aldridge makes 38 per cent.
DeRozan has it down to a science, scoring on a hard to imagine 55 per cent from that range, per basketball-reference.com
Naturally the closer the hoop, the tighter the defense. DeRozan leads the NBA in the number of contested shots he takes at 12.8 a game (Westbrook is next at 9.6). But DeRozan makes them, shooting 59.6 per cent with a defender within four feet. There are 22 players in the league averaging at least six contested field goal attempts a game, and only three others— Durant, Miami Heat big man Hassan Whiteside and Knicks mid-range maestro Carmelo Anthony—make more than half.
Raptors head coach Dwane Casey credits DeRozan’s evolving strength for making him more stable when getting bumped and grabbed. But practice makes perfect. Raptors second-year guard Norm Powell often matches up against DeRozan in practice and sees first-hand how the veteran scorer prepares to make tough shots.
“It doesn’t matter if you have a hand in his face, he’s shooting his shot,” says Powell. “You’re not adjusting his shot. If you block it, you block it. But he knows his angles and his fadeaways and stuff like that. He’s always making the shot [in practice] more difficult than it has to be…so in a game it’s easy. It doesn’t matter who’s guarding him, he’s going to get his shot off.”
But DeRozan is also proving to have a true scorer’s mentality, which is: by any means necessary.
Against the Knicks on Saturday, DeRozan’s shot wasn’t falling consistently but he still got his points. In the first quarter he scored seven points in transition. In the third quarter he got the free throw line three times and scored another basket in transition around his single made jumper.
DeRozan’s always had a considerable will and now more than any time in his career he’s found a way—a lot of ways—to score at a rate no Raptor ever has before.