DeMar DeRozan walks off the court after taking a loss in OT second round NBA playoff basketball action against the Cleveland Cavaliers in Toronto on May 1, 2018.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
When he was drafted by Toronto in 2009, DeMar DeRozan said he knew two things about the city – “Vince Carter and the CN Tower.”
Fifteen years later, he talks about it like the sort of old timer who goes from 0-60 as soon as you say the words “new condo tower.”
“I was here before the aquarium was here,” DeRozan said, eyes widening. “I was here when they were building it. Then I went to it.”
There have been better players in Toronto sports history, and more impactful ones, but there has never been a greater civic convert. A lot of players say they love a city when they’re angling for a contract. DeRozan was the first who kept saying it long after he’d got his money.
When DeRozan arrived, at 19, it was the first time he’d left the United States. His initial impression? “Seeing French on the freeway.”
It’s easy for pros to get stuck into a bubble upon arrival and never leave it – home to practice facility to home to arena to home to airport. The Raptors have had players who avoided going outdoors because they hated the cold so much.
DeRozan was the opposite sort. He has a host of bucolic memories of the city that include “riding bikes on the lakeshore.”
I’ve lived in this city most of my life. I’ve owned several bikes. I’ve never even considered riding one of them along the lakeshore. I enjoy the lakeshore from my car.
DeRozan was back in town promoting a new memoir, Above the Noise. He seems unchanged from the shy, solicitous man who was, for a moment, Toronto’s biggest international sports star.
After running into LeBron James and falling over one too many times in the playoffs, the Raptors traded DeRozan for Kawhi Leonard.
Leonard treated the city like a foreign posting. He was not out and about. He was in and focused. After winning a championship, he leveraged the Raptors to bid up his hometown Los Angeles Clippers and left as quickly as possible. He has since evinced something that resembles romance for the experience, but never for the city.
Meanwhile, DeRozan did something you never see Americans who’ve worked in Canada do – he pined.
There were hurt feelings that have abated, but not disappeared. Just this week, he was telling ESPN that if he’d stayed in Toronto, he would’ve won the same championship in 2019. His rationale? That James decamped for L.A. that year. No James, no problem – or something like that.
Is this a reasonable argument? No, not even close. Leonard didn’t just add something different to the mix. He was the whole recipe. That championship season was one, long, remarkable outlier. Once he left, the team immediately returned to the mean.
In the end, what DeRozan provided to Toronto was an HR template. You want teams in this city to succeed? Then find the DeMar DeRozans.
The city’s sports scene has been moving back into the red. The Raptors are irrelevant. The Blue Jays are about to finish last in the American League East. Once the Maple Leafs start putting charges on the support beams at the end of this year, we will officially have returned to the bad old days (aka the usual days).
What follows that? Bo Bichette, Vlad Guerrero Jr. and Scottie Barnes bang on about how much they love, love, love Toronto and then leave as soon as they can. Then Toronto begins another round of ‘Why don’t foreign athletes love us?’
(The exception here – Auston Matthews and William Nylander – are not exceptions. They don’t stay because they love the city or the Leafs franchise. They stay because they love having the city and the Leafs over a barrel.)
Asked what it was that made him fall for Toronto – the city or his employer – DeRozan said, “The city. At first.”
His suggestions for how to attract and retain talent all came down to the riding-bikes-on-the-lakeshore hypothesis. As a rookie, the Raptors encouraged DeRozan and his teammates to mingle with fans. He recalls showing up at Costcos and Canada’s Wonderland to do guerrilla ticket giveaways via social media.
This was marketing work, but it had the side effect of making DeRozan more familiar with the city than some of its residents. On days off, he was at Jays games doing outreach or paintballing outside the city with teammates.
“I remember when they won a CFL championship,” he said. “The um, um … Grey Cup?
“Yeah, that one.”
DeRozan can rattle off sights and sounds of the city like a Fodor’s guide.
Money isn’t the thing with star athletes these days. Their range is proscribed. There are no surprises. The Jays brass could probably say within a few million this way or that what Bichette and Guerrero will earn in free agency. Everybody has the money to pay them.
A winning program is an attraction, but so’s a home.
Sports franchises operating in non-glamour capitals might ask themselves a few questions – do your players consider your city their home? Do your executives? Do they own their home or rent? When people get a weekend off, do they immediately leave? Do their kids go to school here?
Though it ended poorly with DeRozan, you’d have to say the Raptors played that one exactly right. They hired a curious teenager and indulged his curiosity. As a result, they turned an Angeleno into a guy who knows to drop the second ‘t’ in Toronto. They localized DeRozan.
In return, he re-signed here when every big Raptor before him had left. If he doesn’t sign that contract, Toronto has nothing to trade for Leonard. It’s a pretty straight line from Canada’s Wonderland to an NBA title.
Nowadays, DeRozan doesn’t return much, unless he’s swinging through town playing. He described a week here in summer as “surreal.” He’s still talking like he was raised in the Junction or Mimico.
“Every time I come back, the city has changed so much. Like, there’s even new exits on the Gardiner.”