DeMar DeRozan played with the Toronto Raptors for nine seasons before being traded for Kawhi Leonard in 2018. The trade ultimately catapulted the team to its only NBA championship in franchise history. And it must have been tough for DeRozan to see his former team win without him.
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Not only that, but Toronto was all DeMar had ever known at the time. He was then thrust into the heart of America, where everything is bigger: Texas. At the time, the San Antonio Spurs were approaching a rebuild. So, youth was the focus. But that didn’t mean legendary Head Coach Gregg Popovich was going to forget about his older veteran.
DeRozan says that Pop helped ease the tension after the star forward was included in the blockbuster trade.
“It sucked to leave a place where I wanted to be. But I couldn’t had went to no other better place than San Antonio to be under Pop. Because Pop took me in not as a player, but as a man,” DeRozan said on the Run Your Race podcast with Theo Pinson.
Pinson then said it was probably because he knew it was tough on DeMar. But it wasn’t just that to DeRozan. He said it was his approach to coaching and the modesty that came with it.
“It was the humility that he brought with being a coach that he established right away. That made me feel like, man, I’ll run through a wall for this motherf**ker- and I ain’t even put on a Spurs jersey,” Derozan added.
It’s the reason why so many view Popovich as perhaps the greatest coach of all time. His ability to ease tension and get his players to believe in what he teaches was essential throughout his career. It made him good at coaching anyone from a rookie on his first day to a long-time vet like DeRozan.
But Pop doesn’t just help with bringing the best out of players by accentuating their strengths. He also helps them grow by facing new challenges. And he did the same with DeRozan by getting him to grow his playmaking skills.
“He brought out a lot of stuff in me I didn’t realize I had, and challenged me in ways that I didn’t even realize,” DeRozan expressed. “Like I remember one of my first shootarounds… I’ll never forget this man said, ‘DeMar is the point guard.’ And I was like, what man? I ain’t never been no f**king point guard.”
It must have been a crazy suggestion for a guy who had mostly played small forward throughout his career. At times, DeRozan was a shooting guard in Toronto, but he always excelled as a forward. However, soon DeMar realized Pop was trying to get him to pass the ball more and get his teammates involved. He thought that was a weakness in his game and wanted to challenge him to grow.
The tutelage worked, too. In his three seasons in San Antonio, DeRozan averaged his three career highs in assists per game. “He had me understand for three and a half quarters, dominate, and make your teammates better. Last six minutes of the game, all you,” DeMar added.
That didn’t mean there wasn’t time to shoot when the moment called for DeRozan, though. He led the league in two-pointers attempted per game with the Spurs in his first season with the team, which also ended up in a playoff appearance where they took the Denver Nuggets to 7 Games.
It just goes to show that Pop always knew what he was doing when coaching his players. It’s a shame that he’s retiring as a head coach, but also great that he’s staying involved in the game. DeRozan would probably agree that the game just wouldn’t be the same without Gregg Popovich.
