The problem with experience is it can take a long time to get some.
Listen to DeMar DeRozan as he and his Toronto Raptors teammates turn their attention to their first-round matchup against the Milwaukee Bucks – Game 1 set for Saturday at 5:30 — and the 27-year-old sounds like a wise old man.
Making the playoffs four straight years will do that to an NBA player, particular if the success followed years playing for a lottery team. Playing two Game 7s and stretching the Eastern Conference Finals to a respectable six games a year ago hurried the process along, too.
Not long ago, DeRozan and the Raptors were relative post-season newbies, trying to figure it out, hoping to solve the puzzle and advance to the second round. Not anymore. It’s the youthful Bucks who will have that excuse to use, subconsciously or not.
The Raptors? No longer.
“We’ve learned every type of way you can learn,” said DeRozan. “From being swept [by Washington in 2015], to being an inexperienced young team playing against the most veteran team you can go against in Brooklyn that year [2014] to going to the Eastern Conference Finals, six games.
“The experience that you gain from that is damn near everything you can get out of the playoffs other than a Finals. So going into Saturday’s game, we’ve got to keep that mindset of understanding how hard it is to win, especially that first game. Go out there, be locked in.”
One thing DeRozan can expect is the Bucks will be locked in on him – standard operating procedure when you finish fifth in the scoring race, as DeRozan did, putting up 27.3 points a game, the second-highest average in franchise history to only Vince Carter’s 27.6 in 2000-01.
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It’s been the story of DeRozan’s playoff career, for the most part because it’s worked. He’s only a career 39 per cent shooter in the playoffs, compared with the 46.7 per cent he shot this past season. A scorer who makes a living at the free-throw line suddenly looks very ordinary when defenders are disciplined enough to avoid fouling – the past two playoffs DeRozan has got to the line just 4.3 and 6.2 times per game, well off the 8.6 trips to the line he’s managed in the regular season the last two years. In Toronto’s life-and-death struggle to get past the then-seventh-seeded Indiana Pacers a year ago, DeRozan shot a miserable 31.9 per cent over the seven games.
He was so ineffective in Toronto’s must-win Game 2 that Dwane Casey left him on the bench in the fourth quarter as the Raptors made a comeback to avoid going down 0-2, and even in the deciding Game 7 win, when DeRozan went for 30 points, he missed a staggering 22 shots (he was 10-for-22) en route.
“He was going to empty the clip,” was his running mate Kyle Lowry’s explanation after the Raptors finally advanced past the first round. “That’s what his goal was … we are going to ride with him emptying that clip.”
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DeRozan is quick to describe himself as stubborn, it’s one reason he’s been able to forge a career as a go-to, mid-range scorer who rarely shoots threes – an anachronism in the NBA today. He’s been swimming upstream, in defiance of convention, for his entire career.
But wisdom gained through experience often means learning your own limits, or at least acknowledging there are other ways to do things or, simply, that sometimes you need help.
Perhaps the most encouraging sign for Raptors fans hoping DeRozan lifts the club to even greater heights is that after one of the greatest individual seasons in franchise history, he sounds like the path forward might involve preserving his ammunition once in a while, and helping his teammates benefit from his own gravitational pull on an opponent’s game plan.
“Yeah, I’m prepared for it,” he said of the inevitable defensive schemes he’ll be facing against Milwaukee.
The Bucks had success defending a tired DeRozan when they last played on March 4 with the Raptors losing on the second night of back-to-back with Lowry shelved after wrist surgery. But that’s been the exception as Toronto was 3-1 against Milwaukee this season and is 13-2 the last four seasons.
But there are some causes for concern. Bucks bench boss Jason Kidd coached the Nets in 2014 when DeRozan shot just 38.5 per cent in the first round, and former Raptors assistant Eric Hughes, who was DeRozan’s development coach for his first five NBA seasons, is on Kidd’s staff. If anyone has some insight into how to scheme for DeRozan, Kidd and Hughes would be near the top of the list.
But which DeRozan will they be game-planning for?
The one who steadfastly kept forcing his offence in the playoffs a year ago? Or the one who averaged 5.1 assists in a 16-game stretch that followed the Raptors’ last meeting with the Bucks, when DeRozan vowed to shift his style subtly, to make sure whatever blueprint is out there to lock him down is out of date?
DeRozan struggled to get his offence going against the Pacers in last year’s first round. (Nathan Denette/CP)
If it’s the latter the Raptors will be a much more difficult team to defend than they have been in playoffs past when teams could load up on DeRozan and, to a lesser extent Lowry, confident that they would continue to force the issue, convinced that it was their destiny as pillars of the team.
“I feed off that sort of [defensive] attention,” said DeRozan on Thursday. “Understanding it’s on me to make my teammates better, it’s on me to make the right play. I’m more accepting of it this time around, understanding how teams are going to play me, the attention I’m going to draw defensively so it’s on me to make things easier on my teammates.”
It’s a message that Casey has been preaching for years, but experience is the ultimate teacher, and experience takes time.
When Lowry went down with his wrist injury, DeRozan initially reverted to his native habits. His teammates were used as a last resort as he averaged just three assists a game for the first six outings. But from then on came a shift, and Casey is hopeful it will continue against the Bucks and throughout the playoffs.
“I think he’s more prepared now for the double teams, for the blitzes or whatever teams have done. I think he’s way ahead of the game,” Casey said. “You look at [DeRozan’s] production. The good thing about it is we’ve seen teams do that over the last couple weeks so it’s really helped him from that standpoint, to play out of double teams, play out of blitzes. To pass the ball. The key is understanding, willingness. Not trying to do too much. Accepting it, embracing it. He’s done a good job with that.”
After eight seasons, three playoff appearances and three all-star games and with a contract worth nearly $150-million in his pocket, DeRozan is well into his basketball middle-age, and he has the hard-won wisdom to show for it.
There are no surprises anymore, says Lowry: “We’ve seen a lot of different coverages. He’s comfortable, even more this year. He chooses spots. When I was out, he was playmaking and being aggressive. He just figured it out.”
Has he really seen everything?
“Oh yeah, I definitely agree,” said DeRozan. “Unless we go out there and you send five guys over to guard me and leave four other people on the team open. Yeah, other than that, I feel like I’ve seen every single thing. I watch basketball and I put myself in every position possible when I’m sitting there at home just watching games. So when I get out there I don’t get caught off guard. I try to study the game as much as possible so I’m not unfamiliar with anything that can happen on the court.”
All that’s left is for DeRozan to see it all in front of him and – if needed – recognize that the best play he can make is using the attention he draws to benefit someone else on the floor, for him to use all of that experience not to force his way through an obstacle, but to recognize when there’s another way to around it.
