TORONTO — Imagine the DeKarma.
As the Toronto Raptors stutter and stall on the final fumes of their championship legacy, imagine if it’s DeMar DeRozan who performs last rights?
It would be a fitting conclusion to a season that’s exposed a number of cracks and gaps in the foundation of a franchise he helped build, and now — as a star with the Chicago Bulls, still going strong five years after the Raptors traded him — he could put his old club to sleep with a Bulls win in the play-in game Toronto is hosting on Wednesday night.
The DeRozan trade is arguably the defining moment in the Raptors’ 28-year year history. He was a franchise icon, loyal to a market like no one before, coming off a career year helping the Raptors to a record-setting 59-win season but was moved in the middle of the night in the summer of 2018 for Kawhi Leonard, an NBA mercenary who delivered the best single-season in Raptors history and a title, and then left town the first chance he got.
The Raptors have been living off that title ever since, but the leftovers are pretty picked over at this point. Gone are Kyle Lowry, Marc Gasol, Serge Ibaka, and Danny Green. Head coach Nick Nurse may well be the next to go, and who knows what happens after that?
Toronto went from 59 wins in DeRozan’s last year, to a title in the first year without him to a 60-win pace and a second-round exit in 2020-21, to the Tampa Tank, to an encouraging first year of the Scottie Barnes era last year only to a slide back to their first-ever play-in tournament this season.
Whether the Raptors should even be in the play-in is a question worth debating. There’s a strong argument that the wise decision would have been to start a soft rebuild at the trade deadline: add some depth and some futures for one of their core, allow the last third of the season to play out and then hope for lottery ball luck.
Instead, Raptors executives Masai Ujiri and Bobby Webster opted to add talent and trade picks, repatriating Jakob Poeltl, who was — ironically — part of the DeRozan trade.
The reward was a 41-41 season and ninth place. Best case is the Raptors beat the 10th-place Bulls, travel to either Miami or Atlanta Friday to play whoever loses between the seventh and eighth-place finishers, respectively and — if the Raptors win that — head to Milwaukee for what would almost certainly be a short and painless first-round exit against the NBA’s best team.
Lose Wednesday and the Raptors season is over, the only consolation being they would at least remain in the draft lottery, albeit with a one per cent chance at picking first overall and a 4.8 per cent chance of picking in the top four. Those odds would improve slightly if Chicago and Oklahoma City — the 10th seed in the Western Conference — advance out of the play-in tournament and out of the lottery, but the point remains: the most likely outcome is the Raptors pick at the back end of the lottery.
DeRozan will likely have something to say about all of it.
At 33 years old he’s as expert an offensive player as ever as he averaged 24.4 points and 5.1 assists a game while using his blend of mid-range efficiency and ability to draw fouls to post a true shooting percentage of 59.2 per cent, the second-best of his career.
He won’t get the standard villain treatment when he rolls into Scotiabank Arena. There will be no boos, and even as the Raptors make him the focus of their game plan, there will be no rough treatment, or old scores settled.
Everyone likes him too much.
“DeMar was really nice to me. He’s a good guy,” said O.G. Anunoby, who will likely be the primary defender on DeRozan, whose time in Toronto overlapped with Anunoby’s rookie season in 2017-18. “He’s still a very good friend of mine. Just a great teammate. We all looked up to him. He did a good job teaching us.”
All that said, one of the reasons the Raptors decided to move on from DeRozan was the belief that between his offensive ceiling — his lack of three-point shooting was always a challenge to integrate — and his defensive lapses, he wasn’t someone they could win a title with.
Whether Toronto topping out in the Eastern Conference Finals in the five playoff appearances he helped lead them to is proof or not depends on where you sit.
And the Raptors have generally been able to contain their old teammate, with Anunoby doing much of the heavy lifting.
DeRozan averaged just 14 points a game against his old team, the lowest against any opponent, although he was efficient about it with a True Shooting percentage of 62.7.
It was simply a case of the Raptors using Anunoby and whatever additional helping schemes were required to harass DeRozan, forcing the crafty veteran to get off the ball and trust his teammates.
No one is relying on that, given what’s at stake on Wednesday. After all, DeRozan famously led the Raptors to their first-ever Game 7 victory against the Indiana Pacers in 2016 when he took 32 shots to score 30 points — his ’empty the clip’ game. On a day when the Raptors’ offence was stuck in the mud, DeRozan wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty to pull his team out of it.
DeRozan is a more sophisticated playmaker now than he ever was, but it would be foolish to expect he’s going to let his old team game plan him out of making an impact.
“[He’ll] probably be more aggressive,” said Anunoby. “He’ll definitely be more aggressive on Wednesday. Just us in the game plan, [we’re] trying to limit his touches and force him out as much as possible, try to make it as difficult as possible.”
Few are more suited for the job than Anunoby. The combination of size (six-foot-seven, 240 pounds), strength, quickness, and length that he brings to his defensive assignments is a problem for almost anyone he covers. It’s why he’s got a strong case to be named to one of the NBA’s all-defence teams this season for the first time. Not only does he have great instincts that enabled him to rank first in the NBA in steals this season and second in deflections, but he can also more than hold his own in the kind of isolation situations DeRozan usually thrives in.
No longer is Anunoby the young rookie looking up to the all-star veteran. The 25-year-old has established himself as a force in his own right.
“When I came in I was definitely over-aggressive, biting on his head fakes and stuff and just little tricks he had,” said Anunoby. “Definitely learned from him.”
Over the years Anunoby has taken those lessons and applied them, becoming one of the best wing defenders in the game and putting together a signature season, defensively.
“I think he just took it more personal, and he went for it,” said Raptors guard Fred VanVleet, who has played alongside Anunoby for his entire career. “So hopefully he gets defensive player year, all-defence. He’s definitely well deserving of it. And he’s put on a lot of great performances for us, anchoring our defence and guarding the team’s best player, so he’s more than deserving for sure.”
The Bulls present more problems than DeRozan alone. After a slow start following off-season knee surgery, his running mate Zach Lavine began to find his form before Christmas and averaged 26 points, 4.0 rebounds and 4.4 assists with a True Shooting percentage of 62.9 (league average is 58.1). As well the Bulls emerged as the NBA’s best defensive team since the all-star break, aided by the addition of noted defensive pest Patrick Beverly in the buyout market.
In that sense the two teams have a lot in common. Each is heavily invested in the present and made decisions at the trade deadline to commit themselves to seeing this season through, rather than veering into tank mode. They each finished the season relatively strongly and believe they can make a bigger impact than their seeding position would show.
But only one team will advance on Wednesday, which is why Anunoby — and the full force of the Raptors defence — will be focused on slowing DeRozan down.
It might not work. DeRozan has all the motivation in the world to stick it to his old team.
And if the well-loved former Raptor comes into the building he called home with more pride than almost any Raptor before him and deals Toronto the final indignity in a season with more than its share five years after the trade that broke his heart, who could even be mad?
