If you want just a video on my thoughts about DeMar DeRozan, I recorded an emergency podcast for Locked on Nuggets, you can watch it here.
Otherwise, here’s the bullet points on what I think about DDR joining Denver.
THE GOOD!
DeMar DeRozan is among the most respected people in the league. Everyone loves him. He is universally beloved in every NBA circle. Coaches. Teammates. Trainers. Media. Everyone. He is an awesome dude.
This is going to feel like I’m trying to soften up for a but but it’s important to really outline how much value just having the person DeMar DeRozan around matters. If you’re in a locker room with guys for eight months of the year, you want people you want to be around. Everyone wants DeMar DeRozan around.
He’s a complete professional in every sense of the word. His work ethic, conditioning, availability, accountability, and attitude are all exactly what you want. More players should aim to approach their job with the respect and love for the game that DeRozan does.
DeRozan is still a bucket.
DeRozan shot 49.3 percent fro mid-range last season, 88th percentile on higher volume than almost anyone else; he took the most mid-range shots per game in the league last season.
Among the 53 players who shot 2 or more mid-rangers per game last season, DeRozan was 11th in FG% behind Kevin Durant. Bump it up to four mid-range attempts per game and only ten players qualify but DeRozan was fourth behind SGA, Brunson, and KD.
DeRozan wasn’t just good at mid-range, though. He shot 69.9% at the rim, good for 83rd percentile league-wide.
He’s also an elite grifter. Among 229 players with at least 500 possessions last season, DDR was 13th in percentage of possessions that resulted in free throws; among 89 players with 1,000 possessions or more, he was tied for 7th.
His passing has aged like fine wine. He was 75th percentile in assist percentage.
He averaged 1.07 points per possession as a passer in pick and roll situations, which given he was on the Kings, is like 2.5 points per possession adjusted for functional coaching and talent.
He also never turns it over; he had a 7.5% turnover rate, 92nd percentile league-wise.
He’s not an engine, but he has engine qualities.
THE BAD!
200 players had at least 500 individual possessions logged by Synergy Sports across all playtypes. Of those 200 players, DeMar DeRozan ranked 200th in points per possession allowed.
Some of this data is extremely wonky; if you're the first defender on a guy and he uses a screen and you switch it with a teammate, you still get dinged for it, etc. It’s not perfect data, but it is directionally useful, I’ve found.
But it’s pretty concerning that his defensive issues show up across playtypes. Pick and roll, isolation, spot-up, there’s no real area where his individual defense held up.
His defensive EPM at DunksAndThrees.com was -2.1, good for 1st percentile league-wide. Not a typo. So we have two independent measures showing him to be that bad defensively.
DARKO, LEBRON (via BBall-Index), all of them are pretty worrisome.
A good counter to this is “well, he was on the Kings, what do you expect?” but there’s a reflective nature of this. Yes, the Kings are terrible and the Kings. But the Kings are the Kings because they go after players like DeRozan who are low impact at high salaries and feature them in prominent roles and play them a lot of minutes. The Kings undoubtedly made DeRozan look worse than he was, but the same is probably true of DeRozan making the Kings look worse, at least defensively.
I want to show you a series of graphics that show what players did with and without DeRozan over the last few seasons. Try and spot the pattern.
That’s eight years of data — EIGHT — of primary ballhandlers and key teammates being significantly better both individually and in terms of winning/losing their minutes without DeRozan.
Yes, you can chalk this up to bench minutes, but that would suggest that DeRozan was the only one to play with the bad bench players and his teammates only played with the good ones.
You can suggest noise, but we’re talking so many different categories across so many years.
If this were just counting stats, I wouldn’t care. OK, so they shoot better or put up better counting stats with higher usage without DeRozan. Who cares? But the plus minus is what kills me. All of these players were way better in terms of winning/losing their minutes without DeRozan.
In many of these cases, the same is true for DeRozan, that he had better individual and team success figures without them on the floor. These are all flawed players outside of Lowry in 2017 and 2018. But for the current context, I’m concerned about DeRozan’s impact on his team, not the other way around with DeRozan 37 years old on a minimum contract.
Where this concerns me most is the stagger minutes with Jamal Murray to conceivably start second quarters. Jamal Murray absolutely slides into the profile of Lowry, White, and LaVine, and all those players were worse with DeRozan on the floor.
I don’t think DeRozan will make Jokic worse; I don’t think anything can drag down big fella. I’m not particularly sold on any two-man game dynamics with DeRozan; he can pass to bigs but doesn’t necessarily have a history of great inter-connected play with any type of big man, from Valanciunas in Toronto to Aldridge in San Antonio to Vucevic in Chicago to Sabonis in Sacramento.
None of his assist figures suggest a high level of chemistry. The chemistry’s not bad, DeRozan just doesn’t consistently use two-man concepts. Maybe that changes with his Jokic minutes.
But among the primary reasons Murray staggers are a. to provide a baseline of ballhandling creation in the second units and b. to give him a chance to freelance a little more offensively and consequently c. keep his numbers up.
But DeRozan can’t space. He’s a non-spacer. The only way to get value out of DeRozan consistently is to give him the ball. Which means you have Murray off-ball as a spacer when his value is on-ball, even if he’s a good spot-up weapon (and I’ve advocated for using him off-ball more).
So what this looks like is DeRozan running DeRozan ball, only without a big man to screen and rebound and instead using smallball options with Spencer Jones and Marvin Bagley, while Murray spaces, and when Murray is on-ball, suffering from the lack of spacing. All while Murray and DeRozan get picked apart defensively.
Finally, there’s just the math of it all. Three-point volume is slowly becoming less important in the NBA; only three teams top-ten in 3-point volume were also top-ten in offensive rating last season, the same number of bottom-10 three-point volume squads in the top ten in offense.
But a team built on ball movement like Denver needs space to move the ball into and through, and DeRozan complicates that. His teams have had a three-point deficit when he’s on the floor, predictably, since he left Toronto.
The formula that concerns me is this: a bad defensive team that gives up more threes than it takes/makes and tries to keep up with mid-range twos and free throws.
I don’t know that anything can really slow down the Nuggets’ offense with Jokic on the floor, but 2025 was a year when teams would routinely simply shoot more threes to outpace Denver, even if they weren’t a volume 3-point team coming in.
THE FUN!
I’ll have a full film breakdown closer to the start of the season, but there are some elements that I can already tell should really work.
