When I Lost The Last Remaining Shred of Hope

I'll confess: I kinda like DeMar DeRozan. He seems like a good guy, he seems to really reach out to the community and he understands that he's representing the city and the fans and he plays in a way that seems to be consistent with that. And by all accounts he works really hard to get better.

If there's a human being I can say I'm glad got a payday like DeRozan just got, DeMar DeRozan would be on that list. He's not at the top of it by any stretch of the imagination, but he's on it. Good for him and his family.

There's only one problem, though: he's just not very good, and his contract is going to be an albatross on the neck of this franchise for a very long time.

DeMar currently sits not even in the midst of a career year; he's basically been what he's always been. He has a PER of 14.3, he's not shooting well from the floor, he's getting to the line even less frequently (measuring by FTA/FGA) than he has before and his rebounding hasn't even come back to the level of his rookie season. His AST% is down from last year. His defense is where it's always been since he's been a rookie: decently efficient, but so uninvolved that in the whole scheme of things that he has no impact whatsoever.

This is what Bryan Colangelo paid $9.5 million/year for. For four years.

Colangelo has no business whatsoever making an argument for upside. You simply don't pay for tomorrow's performance today at full price; you have to expect some sort of discount for paying up front for performance which is nowhere close to being in view. And when you're the only bidder, why would you pay for a level of production to which DeRozan hasn't even come close in his entire career? If we measure a player's salary against the wins he contributes, DeRozan's contract should be around the MLE level, and not much more. (The league on average pays about $1.7 million/win; DeRozan's pro-rated 82 game Win Shares last year was 3.3, so perhaps you could justify as much as $5.7 million for him; Colangelo, for reasons known only to himself, paid almost twice that.)

Nobody in the world (with any sense) pays for upside which hasn't been delivered in any meaningful way yet, anyway. If any of us mere mortals were to invest in a stock which promised us consistent dividends, and we're gone through three fiscal quarters and the company hasn't issued a thin red dime in dividends, then most of us would move that stock. That is especially true when it's a young start-up and the suits are still promising dividends at some undetermined point in the future and there's a bunch of other people interested in giving it a shot, and paying a little bit of a premium for it. Common sense says to sell high on that stock, and put your money into a proven performer instead of waiting on "potential" which is highly unlikely to materialize.

I'm beginning to sound like a broken record on this point, but I thought maybe Colangelo had learned his lessons coming into this year. We all know his previous contract disasters: Kapono's four-year full MLE deal, Fields' deal, Calderon's $9 million/year contract for five years, issued in a year when there were only three teams with more than the full MLE available to offer and none of them needed a point guard, Bargnani's contract (so full of optimism that it was nauseating; not an ounce of that contract had anything to do with production of wins), Turkoglu's contract...etc. etc. But then there promising signs: he put together a crafty front-loaded bid to get Jarrett Jack, using the luxury tax as a weapon against Indiana. He kinda gave Kleiza a little less than the full MLE (and, even so, Kleiza's contract has been terrible value). He paid Amir Johnson fairly, as far as win production goes (even though he thought he was overpaying him). And then Colangelo said that the team simply wasn't good enough to not move guys, and he publicly says he's going to be very careful before even thinking about extending DeRozan. I thought maybe lessons had been learned.

And then he went and offered that ridiculous contract to DeRozan.

It all came crashing down at that moment. Colangelo simply cannot help himself, I concluded; he has no sense of value as far as the NBA is concerned. Either in terms of how to assess it, or how to acquire it. For a guy with a business and applied economics degree from Cornell, he sure as hell doesn't know how to put appropriate value on things.

Bryan Colangelo is simply going to keep doing the same stuff that got the Raptors into the mess they're in right now, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. This is who he is, on a fundamental level. This is what he does. This is what we can expect. The man is so lacking in sense that he has gone and capped out a team that has won a mere 30.8% of its games over the previous two years.

How is a business graduate so clueless as to invest that much in an entity which performs so poorly? How is that a high-percentage investment?

Alas, asking questions like these, I fear, is to induce but more despair. Bryan Colangelo isn't thinking rationally about this team. There's no other conclusion to reach about that. Instead of building a rational team, he's trying to assemble a team he likes, or he wants to cheer for. But, should he be thusly inclined, he should resign his job and become the Athletic Director at a mid-major NCAA program somewhere, or stick to the D-League or the NBL. The NBA is a competitive high-stakes environment, and only those capable of dynamic thought and bold action survive.

Bryan Colangelo with stats team, working on the Raptors' line-up