DeMar DeRozan Keeps Getting Better, Even Without a 3-Point Shot

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports Canada.

With the final minute of the game ticking off the clock and the Raptors leading by seven, the ball found its way into the hands of DeMar DeRozan, as it so often has through Toronto's first four games. Up against a dwindling shot clock, DeRozan let fly with a 29-footer. It found the bottom of the net—that's just the way DeRozan's season is starting—locking down the 10-point victory and the all-star guard's second 40-point night of the young season.

In the mind of Kyle Lowry, it also took away an unnecessary talking point that's been attached to DeRozan's ludicrous start to the season.

"And tonight he hit a three," Lowry said after the game. "Now y'all can't say he's not a 3-point shooter—1-for-2, man. Fifty percent. Y'all can't get mad at him now. Now what? He scored 40 points and hit a three. What y'all gonna say now?"

Lowry's defense of his tag-team partner's lack of outside shooting is part jest and part irritation, and it's easy to see why he may have grown tired of hearing qualifiers about DeRozan's accomplishments. Not only are they criticisms of a team setup that's clearly working—the Raptors rank eighth in offensive rating early on in what should be their fourth consecutive season with a top-ten offense—but there's a bit of throwing the baby out with the bath water when it comes to evaluating DeRozan's hot start. Over the long run, and from a sustainability perspective, the how absolutely matters, but in this moment, DeRozan is dominating like no other player in the league and no other player in franchise history.

"He's playing on another level right now, man. He's making my life a lot easier right now," Lowry said.

From a longer-term perspective, it's not as if how DeRozan is going about leading the league in scoring is terribly out of character. The degree to which he's doing so—of course averaging 36.3 points per game on 55.4 percent shooting isn't sustainable—is surprising, but the means of production are what those watching closely have come to expect from the two-time all-star. He may grade out as a below-average 3-point shooter by accuracy and by volume, but the numbers no longer suggest DeRozan is what his critics accuse.

Long established as a premier volume scorer, the larger narrative around DeRozan has been slow to catch up to his evolving game. While it's true that DeRozan is one of, if not the most prolific mid-range scorer in all of basketball, writing his offense off as a relic of a bygone of play is a gross oversimplification. You could even argue it's a defensible "zag" as modern defenses "zig" to encourage less efficient two-point shots, if he continues to do as good a job as he's done making sure those looks are clean. He also led the league in points scored off of drives last season, setting a team record for trips to the free-throw line, and if there's anything that's going to balance out a two-heavy approach, it's getting to the rim and to the charity stripe.

He can dunk, too. [Raptors]

DeRozan wound up posting a true-shooting percentage of 55 in 2015-16, comfortably above the league average and with a 29.8-percent usage rate. Given the accepted trade-offs between volume and efficiency, it's hard to spin last year's version of DeRozan as an inefficient scorer overall. His true-shooting percentage has jumped to 61.4 here early on. That's aided by a 58.5-percent mark on pull-up jumpers that's likely to regress close to the 40-percent mark, but he's still third in the league in points off of drives and 10th in free-throw attempts. (Thanks to a small-sample anomaly, DeRozan actually has a points percentage higher than 100 on drives.)

In other words, DeRozan is going to cool off when fewer jumpers drop, but he's not doing anything that he hasn't done before, stylistically. He's just getting better and better at the shots he takes, pushing them ever-closer to the rim as the years go by. Heralded for his tireless work ethic, DeRozan's earned a reputation as someone who brings something new to his game every season. Fans and critics have waited for the 3-point shot to be one of those additions for years, and while it's probably not coming in a significant way, DeRozan's evolved demonstrably inside the arc over the years.

Shot charts via Austin Clemens

"I'm just a student of the game," DeRozan said Wednesday of his evolution. "I work extremely hard in the summertime. Extremely hard. I just try to put everything together, be a student of the game while working, always feeling like I'm new to the game so I can soak up as much as possible."

Ask around, and there aren't many names that can be put up next to DeRozan's in terms of what players are capable of doing with the ball. That the Raptors' successful offense is predicated on getting Lowry and DeRozan into favourable matchups to attack one-on-one (and distribute when the defense breaks down) says a lot. Once DeRozan's gotten the switch he wants, there are few who can blend strength, footwork, and body control the way he does. Head coach Dwane Casey offers James Harden as a left-handed comparable inside the arc, and Harden was once an MVP runner-up with largely the same defensive limitations as DeRozan (he shot a ton of threes, too, though).

DeRozan's blend of mid-range shooting, driving ability, and work in the post is unique. Just how good he is in each area is so subtle that even those around the league may not be fully aware until they get an up-close look.

"You know, I knew DeRozan was a scorer, but I didn't realize how much body control he has," Raptors assistant coach Patrick Mutombo said in training camp when asked what stood out to him most when he first arrived in Toronto this summer. "I've scouted against him many times, and just the strength that he possesses, his lower body. And I don't know if this is new, but just looking closely, I'm pretty impressed of his body strength and how he's able to absorb contact and still get shots up there, which is very, very hard to do.

"I don't think people realize how hard it is to do."

What people seem to realize quite keenly is that DeRozan doesn't hit a lot of threes. That's a fact, and it's unlikely to change much. The conversation around the totality of DeRozan's offensive game should, though, because he's grown past the point of being a one-dimensional volume scorer.

"That's his game," Lowry said earlier in the week. "People say he don't shoot threes. It don't matter."