IT’S AN INSUFFERABLY hot day in early August, and Billy Donovan and the Chicago Bulls‘ coaching staff are gathered in Las Vegas for NBA summer league. Just a few days prior, the team had signed 31-year-old DeMar DeRozan to a three-year, $85 million contract, and the four-time All-Star had made the trip to join the team from his home in Southern California.
Donovan, whose Bulls had finished 11th in the East behind a 19th-ranked offense and an 11th-ranked defense, had questions — and he wanted his new star guard to help answer them.
With the Bulls’ brain trust — Donovan, executive vice president of basketball operations Arturas Karnisovas and general manager Marc Eversley — DeRozan rides over to UNLV’s Thomas and Mack Center from the team’s hotel on the Strip, the Waldorf Astoria. The previous night, the foursome had dined together at the Aria Hotel, in what was effectively a first date.
They’d spoken about DeRozan’s life in the league and his plans to look at homes in Chicago. It was a pleasant evening. New NBA relationships are always pleasant in August.
Donovan and his staff had spent the last week engaged in an advanced course in DeMarology. They’d studied film from his time in Toronto and San Antonio. They’d made note of how and where and when their ball-dominant guard had received the ball in the half court.
Armed with these first impressions, and beneath the sounds of squeaky sneakers in the small gym at UNLV, Donovan and DeRozan have their first discussion of their respective basketball philosophies.
DeRozan tells Donovan that he’s cognizant of his reputation as primarily a midrange, isolation player, but he feels this perception is unfair. He says he loves to survey the half court from the middle of the floor and find teammates — something that became a staple of his game in San Antonio. Donovan tells DeRozan that he wants the team to run and push the pace, in order to maximize fellow newcomer Lonzo Ball and Zach LaVine.
Two basketball lifers who’d found success in different ways pledge to find a mutual vision that would help lead the Bulls to their first playoff series win since 2015.
“I told him I was open to anything he wanted to put out there,” DeRozan says now.
“It was an unbelievable conversation,” Donovan says. “He’s a basketball savant.”
Energized by the talk, Donovan gathers the coaching staff back at the hotel. For the rest of the week, in a suite with a whiteboard and a large video screen, coaches take turns scribbling sets that address their offensive priorities: How can we get Nikola Vucevic involved in as many actions as possible? How can we speed up the game for Ball while still honoring DeRozan’s more meticulous style? How can we find efficient ways for LaVine to score?
Most of all: How can we devise a system that emphasizes speed and the kind of movement that feeds energy to an offense with DeMar DeRozan, a player who built an All-Star career rarely doing either one?
A month later at training camp, Donovan insists on as much real-world simulation as possible.
“Every day it’s 5-on-5,” he tells his team. And though there’s some throat clearing, the flexibility promised by both sides is delivered. Some of the more elaborate side-to-side movement and sets coaches hope to implement are tabled, and the players do their best to mesh some contrasting styles, with Team Slow committing to get the ball up more swiftly.
The Bulls jump out to a 10-5 record against an easy schedule, behind a 10th-ranked offense and LaVine playing the best basketball of his life. But playing fast proves to be a challenge, and they’re quickly in the bottom 10 in the league in passes per possession.
Donovan and DeRozan appreciate that the team is good. An offense that sort of works can win regular-season games.
But an offense that contends flows naturally. To tap it, a veteran star accustomed to playing a deliberate style and a coach who aspires to play with pace and motion know they’ll need to work even harder. And DeRozan will develop even more tricks to what already is some of the best footwork in the game.
This will be a season-long, high-stakes exercise in problem solving. All in search of an answer to the most profound question facing the biggest move of the Bulls’ rebuild:
Can a team led by this DeMar DeRozan actually bring a title to Chicago?
IT’S COMMON FOR NBA players and coaches with different tendencies to be thrown together. Some are never able to reconcile those differences — Carmelo Anthony and Mike D’Antoni in New York, George Karl and DeMarcus Cousins in Sacramento. Others achieve coexistence and mutual success — Giannis Antetokounmpo and Khris Middleton with Mike Budenholzer in Milwaukee.
DeRozan’s arrival in Chicago was widely panned. To the critics, DeRozan was a guard on the wrong side of 30 who couldn’t hit the league’s most important shot, didn’t defend and preferred isolation to ball movement, and had underperformed in the postseason. An $85 million contract for that? In Zach LaVine, the thinking went, the Bulls already had a high-volume iso scorer.
During DeRozan’s mid-to-late 20s, when the Spurs and Warriors dominated the NBA, teams aspired to beat opponents with the pass- and motion-heavy offense predicated on perpetual ball movement and nifty multiplayer actions. “The ball finds energy”– D’Antoni’s maxim — guided the league’s collective sensibilities. All the while, “iso,” “mismatch basketball,” and “ballstopper” became terms of derision, displays of selfishness and “hero ball,” anachronisms that betrayed the prevailing egalitarian style.
Certain players receive exemptions from criticism — James Harden and Damian Lillard made mincemeat of opponents in isolation situations. But DeRozan is one of those guys who, for many, personified the excesses of iso ball. Between 2014 and 2018, he ranked third in total isolations, yet only 20th of 41 in efficiency among those who averaged 200 isos per season over that span. He began to refine his game in San Antonio, applying a veteran’s guile at creating space and reading defenses.
Since Second Spectrum began tracking the NBA at the start of the 2013-14 season, LaVine and DeRozan rank first and second, respectively, among active players who aren’t point guards in both dribbles per touch and touch length.
While the league moved away from iso ball and simultaneously embraced the 3 ball, DeRozan did neither. He managed to post true shooting percentages around league average his first 10 seasons in the league, largely by sinking 5.4 free throws per game — 11th among active players. As if he wasn’t already out of step with the new school, DeRozan took a higher percentage of his field goal attempts from midrange than any qualified player each of the previous three seasons.
So here’s Donovan and his staff, eager to play faster, with crisp motion, and at maximum efficiency — and they’re furnished with one of the most deliberate scorers in the league, one who’s dependent on a shot most are trying to eradicate from the game. They realize early that DeRozan’s appetite for the midrange is insatiable and, fortunately, his consumption is rather efficient.
So they look to tweak another facet of their offense: speed.
THE EARLY ATTEMPTS at shuttling the ball up the floor quickly have mixed results. Few can push a secondary break with an exquisite outlet pass better than Ball. LaVine can race down the floor at warp speed.
But DeRozan, like his hero Kobe Bryant, surveys the floor, decodes the defense, advances carefully against his primary defender. Then the instant he’s gained maximum advantage, he strikes. It’s a craft — and it takes time.
“I don’t want to play with a win-a-race type of mindset,” DeRozan says. “I never like feeling like someone is going to speed me up. It’s not beneficial. I don’t feel like I need to play fast to be productive. I like more of a chess game.”
From opening night until Thanksgiving, the Bulls rank 13th in pace, and from Thanksgiving to the moment Ball is sidelined they rank … 13th in pace. A month later, the Bulls rank … 13th in pace. Over time, the coaching staff begins to accept a roster led by DeRozan, with or without Ball, will be playing quite a bit of chess. At the same time, DeRozan appreciates that chess clocks have a nice way of keeping the game moving.
“DeMar is never going to be this speed merchant down the floor,” Donovan says. “But as a group, we all got to this place where we could focus on initiating our offense more quickly.”
With speed as secondary priority — and motion as a tertiary one, at best — the Bulls realize that to best capitalize on DeRozan’s skills, their offensive imperative needs to be spacing. Give DeRozan enough breathing room in the half court and he’ll manufacture points in bulk.
During training camp and into the first month of the season, the Bulls engage in a broad exercise of trial and error.
“Listen, this is gonna take a little bit of time to figure out,” Donovan tells the team early in the season, “but the more we throw up against the wall in terms of trying different stuff, the better we’ll evolve.”
Not everything works. Placing Vucevic in the dunker spot near the basket, or having him flash to the middle, clogs up the lane for DeRozan and LaVine. The remedy? Leverage Vucevic’s range as a shooter by stepping him away from the lane line and flashing him from the corner. In addition, DeRozan tells the staff that playing iso along the baseline is difficult because help defenders can easily swarm.
“I said, ‘Put me in the middle of the floor where I can see the double [team],'” DeRozan says. “Now I can dictate, and get downhill a little bit more instead of just playing on the post, or the wing, where they could come double. Every three to five games, we have conversations about what’s working and what can work better. ”
Working in the middle of the floor has afforded DeRozan the opportunity to playmake, they’d realized. Both he and Donovan make a point to stipulate that a possession that begins as an isolation can end in DeRozan passing out of the aforementioned double-teams. He’s done plenty of it — leading his team in assist percentage this season, and in each of the previous three in San Antonio.
About those isolations: DeRozan’s dominance can’t be overstated. In direct isolation situations — possessions that result in either a shot or a pass to a shooter — DeRozan ranks first among 47 players with 200 or more iso possessions. His 118.1 points per 100 possessions is nearly eight points better than No. 2 Steph Curry (110.2) — and there’s a greater distance between DeRozan and Curry than there is between Curry and No. 14 Joel Embiid. In points per iso chance, DeRozan also leads the field by a healthy 2.5 points per 100 possessions.
His steady uptick in efficiency doesn’t stem from any considerable improvement in shot selection. But DeRozan’s coaches in Chicago and scouts around the league have one common theory:
DeRozan’s footwork, a choreography that continues to grow more artful with each passing year.
DeRozan still exacts much of this damage in the midrange, that dreaded forbidden ground in the modern NBA game. For the fourth consecutive season, he’s the league leader in percentage of overall shot attempts from midrange, according to Cleaning the Glass. Among players who have attempted half their shots from the midrange this season, only he, Kevin Durant, Chris Paul, Deandre Ayton and Tyus Jones shoot better than 50%.
“These guys got to this level for a specific reason,” Donovan says. “There are just certain players, a handful of guys, who outshoot the numbers of what is ‘a bad shot,’ and he’s one of them. And I want to play to his strengths.”
That strength hasn’t compromised the Bulls’ attack. After finishing last season ranked 16th in percentage of overall shots from 3-point range, Chicago ranks 29th this season, though with a far more efficient offense.
And while he’s inching toward two attempts per game from beyond the arc, DeRozan isn’t likely to incorporate the 3-pointer as a staple of his diet. With many defenses countering rim-and-3 offenses with those areas of focus, DeRozan believes the opportunity for good looks in the midrange has never been more advantageous.
“It’s like an ocean out there,” DeRozan says. “You can operate freely in the midrange. If you’re smart, you can take advantage of the space and pick teams apart.”
As Donovan and the Bulls have discovered, DeRozan rules that sea.
THE TEN GOOSE Boxing Gym wedged between a barber shop and a print shop on a narrow street in Van Nuys, California, is one of DeRozan’s happy places. The boxing ring might not look like a chess table, but it’s where DeRozan masters the dark arts that guide his deliberate maneuvers in one-on-one situations — that footwork that enables him to get better every season.
“Boxing translates over to basketball,” he says. “You learn how to get into an opponent’s body, and you learn subtle step movements that create just enough space to get off a shot, or get off a jab. These are the small things you need as you get older.”
DeRozan regularly draws contrasts between himself and peers he sees as more “athletic,” be it teammate LaVine, younger players or even the DeMar DeRozan of his youth. He believes that since returning from a groin injury in 2015, he’s had to modify his game to compensate — and this realization is a predominant theme in the second half of his career. He enjoys studying film of the NBA’s old-guy-at-the-Y archetypes — for instance, Andre Miller (“so crafty”), Joe Johnson (“a motherf—er”) — players who, absent any discernible physical ability, extended careers to their 40th birthdays.
But on a late-February night in Chicago, DeRozan isn’t in his twilight or on his rocking-chair tour. He’s leading a Bulls team that’s neck-and-neck for the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference in the first game back from the All-Star break. And from the opening tip, DeRozan owns the ring.
Less than two minutes into the game, against the Atlanta Hawks’ best perimeter defender, DeAndre Hunter, DeRozan unleashes his patented upfake, draws Hunter in the air, then sidesteps into open space for an easy 10-footer off the glass. He squeezes around Hunter again one-on-one to end the quarter, this time with a magnificent step-through. He claims 16 of the Bulls’ 24 first-quarter points, on 7-for-10 shooting from the field.
The Bulls and Hawks are nip-and-tuck for much of the second half, with the Hawks taking a 3-point lead into the final minute of the game. That’s when DeRozan strikes again, cutting the lead to a single point with a drive, quick stop, lateral step and jumper over Bogdan Bogdanovic.
What happens next time down, with the Bulls trailing by a single point and 20 seconds to go, is practically a companion piece to DeRozan’s testimonial about the canny parallels of boxing: You learn how to get into an opponent’s body, and you learn subtle step movements that create just enough space to get off a shot, or get off a jab. These are the small things you need as you get older.
Again matched up with Bogdanovic, DeRozan works his way to the middle of the floor at the top of the key. The double-team he’s programmed to detect comes quickly (Kevin Huerter from the right wing). DeRozan spins clockwise away from Huerter to the left elbow. He springs forward, then lurches from pivot to jump spot in one deceptive motion away from the defender. He has created the space and now he has just enough to square and elevate over Bogdanovic for the jumper (and the drawn foul on Huerter) that will give the Bulls’ their fourth consecutive win.
The bucket is DeRozan’s 13th shot attempt of the night between 10 feet and the arc — and his ninth make. It’s a steady stream of midrange play, often in isolation and usually resulting in shots that would be ill-advised for 95% of the NBA’s players. But even as he leads the NBA among all non-point guards this season in dribbles per touch and touch length, DeRozan has aged into the elite ranks of the cunning tacticians whose game defies the current norms.
It’s easy to forget that the vaunted features of modern NBA basketball — motion, pace, 3s-and-layups — are means to an end. Their virtue lies in their capacity to produce efficient outcomes. But what if you can achieve the end without the means?
What if your team is led by DeMar DeRozan?
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