What I’m about to type isn’t new. But it sure is staggering.
DeMar DeRozan’s 13th season in the NBA was his best. The Chicago Bulls’ first-year forward finished second in the NBA in total points scored and earned his fifth All-Star nod. When award season rolled around, DeRozan became an All-NBA Second Team member for the second time in his career. The honor solidified his return to an elite club for many, but did he ever really have his membership revoked?
While DeRozan’s 2021-22 campaign led to the most team-wide success he’s seen in quite some time, the player we saw on the floor wasn’t all that different. His scoring prowess, in particular, has been hidden in plain sight year after year. In fact, a real argument can be made that he’s been the best isolation scorer in the league for roughly half a decade, and he only strengthened that argument this season.
Among players who averaged at least 3.0 isolation possessions per game in the 2021-22 regular season (minimum 50 games played), DeRozan led the way with 1.13 points per possession per NBA Stats. His 50.6 percent field goal percentage on isolation attempts also sat second behind only Kevin Durant. In other words, when DeRozan was given the green light to attack one-on-one, he was the hardest player to stop in the league. And it’s been that way for a long time.
DeRozan has sat No. 1 in isolation PPP over the past three seasons (minimum 2.9 isolation attempts per game). Check the years before that; he sat at least top-six from 2015-2019.
His field goal percentage – as you can assume – has also remained sky high. DeRozan finished with a top-two clip each season since the 2016-17 season, which included two top finishes in 2019-20 and 2020-21. Look back one more year to the 2015-16 season (the first year the NBA database tracked isolation scoring), and DeRozan finished with the 6th-highest field goal percentage.
When he isn’t sinking shots, though, he continues to use his lethal skills to get to the free throw line. DeRozan comfortably had the highest free-throw frequency in isolation situations during his first season in Chicago. Once again, this number only reflects what he’s done during a good portion of the past decade. Before finishing first in free throw frequency during the 2020-21 campaign, DeRozan ranked top-three in each of the five previous seasons.
Durant, Harden, Irving, Doncic, and Booker help represent a group of dominant NBA scorers. Each comes to mind when we think about deadly one-on-one success, and each has finished among the league’s best isolation players at one point or another. But the fact of the matter is that almost nobody – with the exception of maybe Harden – has been as consistently unstoppable as the Bulls’ most recent leading scorer. And I’m not sure that has been talked about nearly enough.
Considering all of this, it’s even harder to believe that DeRozan’s free agency status wasn’t a bigger deal one summer ago. While I understood the concerns about his seemingly ball-dominant nature, the results have always spoken for themselves. Not to mention, being a skillful isolation scorer doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a selfish player. Not only did DeRozan demonstrate that as he effortlessly paired alongside Zach LaVine, but he did so in San Antonio with a career-high 6.9 assists in 2020-21.
Speaking of which, I’d expect to see DeRozan’s assist numbers creep back up as we enter the 2022-23 season. A healthy Zach LaVine could very well mean fewer isolation scoring opportunities for DeRozan. The fellow All-Star will likely demand the rock more, and the offense will probably steer back toward the transition-minded/ball-movement style we saw succeed in the early portion of last season. The scary thing about that is we all know less volume can sometimes impact a player’s rhythm (*points toward Vucevic*), but the good news is DeRozan isn’t just any player. He’s one of the best.