Remembering DeMar DeRozan’s first rodeo

What pumped the brakes on DeRozan’s red-hot start?

Just like anything else with the San Antonio Spurs over the last few seasons, definitive answers have been difficult to come by. As a unit, the Spurs performed at the rate of a 55-win team in January, going 10-5 with motivating wins over the likes of the eventual champion Toronto Raptors, Oklahoma City Thunder and even the Phoenix Suns.

As for the Spurs’ first-year star, friendly bounces had become hard to come by. We discussed how unfortunate it was in number: over the entire calendar month, he shot above 50 percent just twice. So, what was the reason?

Spurs’ film analysis and writer Tom Petrini seemed to have the most plausible reasoning. DeMar DeRozan, always a tough shot maker, appeared to have tired legs throughout the month. As he alluded to, DeRozan, then 29, hadn’t played that many minutes since he was a 24-year-old in 2013-14.

By nature and shot preference, he’s always been a tough shot maker; as his the shot chart proves, he simply wasn’t making those shots this time around.

The secondary explanation for DeRozan’s drop in production revolves around what one could consider an unwritten rule in sports: with one star struggling, the onus shifts to the next, in this case, LaMarcus Aldridge.

It is largely not a coincidence that DeRozan’s worst slump becomes interconnected with Aldridge’s most impactful month of the season — a January in which he averaged 24.2 points, 8.3 rebounds per game, produced a 63.0 true shooting percentage and drove the Spurs’ offensive rating to 125 when on-court — to serve as the bedrock required to get the Spurs through a critical stretch.

The thing is, that’s basketball at its purest. To expect superstars of even the finest caliber to perfectly calibrate their focus over an 82-game season would be foolish. As a potential positive, with DeRozan historically, the peaks and valleys of any given season are at the very least traceable.

This time, we’ll use the more dependable 752-game sample size over the 77-game sample from 2018-19.  Over the course of his career, DeRozan routinely sees declines across the board in efficiency (51.3 true shooting percentage against his average 53.6) and team offensive rating (104 versus 109) in the month of January.

With these clues in mind, we have a better understanding of what DeRozan can do during 2019-20 to ensure he returns for his fifth All-Star Game and has the Spurs in position to do more damage in the postseason than they’ve grown accustomed to over the last few seasons.