What DeMar DeRozan, Denver Nuggets hope to find in each other – USFTB

Stuck in a losing streak, DeMar DeRozan decided the Toronto Raptors needed a jump scare or a laugh to snap out of it. Most of his teammates were settled on the team bus when a masked man stepped aboard, his identity unrecognizable under a full-body Halloween costume. Rudy Gay thinks it was Pinhead from the 1987 horror movie “Hellraiser,” a villain with rusty nails sticking out of a bald scalp from every angle. He stalked down the aisle.

“In full character,” Gay said. “He just does stupid stuff like that. He’s a troll.”

It was 2013. The exact date is lost to time, but the timing is what made it so weird. Nobody else was wearing a costume that night as the Raptors prepared for a road game, because it was very much not Halloween. DeRozan eventually revealed himself.

“It sucks to lose,” he said. “You’re going through it. Sometimes you’re just trying to find that joy, have some fun, something to take your mind off it and let the tension go. At heart, I’m still a big kid.”

A new role for a longtime star

DeRozan was the star of that Raptors team, and he’s more or less been the star of every team he’s played for since then, from Toronto to San Antonio to Chicago to Sacramento. He arrived in Denver this summer as something unfamiliar, a super-sub for a perennial playoff team desperate for bench scoring and equally desperate to maintain championship-contender status.

The Nuggets have gradually lost that status since they won their first title in 2023, led by a transcendent Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray, buoyed by a rotation that barely went eight-deep. They’ve felt the effects of roster erosion in four consecutive offseasons, most recently with the loss of Peyton Watson via sign-and-trade and Tim Hardaway Jr. to a free-agent market they couldn’t compete in. In a changing NBA, where depth has suddenly become just as essential to survival as star power, the 37-year-old DeRozan is the latest trick up Denver’s sleeve.

The Nuggets signed him to a one-year veteran minimum contract in August, hoping the six-time All-Star wing can help them salvage something out of a low point in the Jokic-Murray era. Last season, they failed to win a playoff series for the first time since 2022. This season, which tips off Thursday in Oklahoma City, they face their steepest uphill battle yet in the Western Conference.

They were drawn to DeRozan for two reasons as they begin that climb: His pedigree as the 18th-leading scorer in league history, and his stature among peers as a beloved teammate.

“One of the realest cats in the NBA,” said Amir Johnson, who played with him in Toronto.

“He’s the most stoic person I’ve ever met in my life,” Gay added.

DeRozan is widely seen as a quiet, poised figure who has helped trailblaze mental health dialogue around the NBA. And then there’s the side of DeRozan not often seen publicly: the sly locker-room comedian. The two, of course, are intertwined. If humor comes more naturally to DeRozan than anger as a leadership method, he figures it’s because lightening the mood is its own form of empathy.

“You never know what somebody else is going through,” he said. “So for me, while I have the opportunity to play this game, come to work and be around the guys, I always try to just make light of what we do. We play a sport that we all love. We have the privilege to be able to make a lot of money doing it.”

“I knew people that knew him well, and the way they talked about him just as a person in the room was also part of the reason why we wanted him,” Nuggets coach David Adelman said. “He can really score. He can really play. But having another leader in that room — losing Tim and losing Bruce (Brown), two personalities in our locker room … you have to go find it on the free agency market. With DeMar, that’s one of those things we wanted. A veteran leader. Failed. Succeeded. Been through all of it.”

Almost all of it. For the Nuggets, DeRozan represents hope for the bench. For DeRozan, a new role in Denver is one of the last frontiers in an illustrious career, as he reckons with the end.

A student of the game

DeRozan first experienced basketball as an artifact on videotape. His dad worked for the Compton Cable Company and had access to a dual-tape recording machine. He could insert a VHS tape in one slot and a blank tape in the other and copy the original. He brought home dozens of movies and TV shows and, most importantly, decade-old NBA games to show his son.

DeMar sat on the living room floor, surrounded by stacks of tapes, entranced by Magic Johnson and Julius Erving and Alex English. They weren’t relics of the past to him. Somehow, in grainy footage, they felt immediate. Watching their faded glory days was as energizing as a live game.

“You just see the passion,” he said. “It felt like research back then. Knowing your history of the game.”

DeRozan still has a lot of the tapes, along with his dad’s other stuff. He thinks it would be cool to show his kids some of the old games he grew up watching. His son is 4 years old now, “a sports fanatic” already, DeRozan says. But it’s 2026. His family doesn’t have a VCR player. Frank DeRozan died in 2021, and for years, DeMar has been meaning to find a way to transfer the videos to digital form. He just hasn’t gotten around to it. Maybe it doesn’t matter, he wonders, because it’s so easy to access the history of the game online now. DeRozan’s son can pull up a 1986 NBA Finals game on YouTube whenever he wants.

But there’s something sentimental about the videotaped recordings, about knowing he can pass down his father’s history lessons. “It was the bonding thing that I held on tight to with my dad,” DeRozan said. “It always meant the world to me. … With my kids, it gives me a different perspective, you know what I mean?” Time flew. Whenever he watches those tapes next, whenever he transfers them over to show his children, he’ll be closer to the heroes inside the screen than the awestruck boy on the living room floor.

For now, the memories remain preserved in the tapes, suspended in time.

A cherished friend and a mentor

During the 2014-15 season in Toronto, DeRozan, Kyle Lowry, Chuck Hayes, Lou Williams and Amir Johnson formed a group chat. “Real Ones,” they called it. The five teammates shared a tradition after morning shootarounds on the road: Instead of waiting for the team bus to haul them back to the hotel, they would pile into a taxi together to beat everyone else back and get first dibs on the breakfast spread.

“I don’t know why that was a thing,” Johnson said in hindsight, “but that’s what we did. … Drivers were looking at us like, ‘How are all of you guys gonna fit in this car?’”

DeRozan’s ex-teammates tend to cherish their memories with him, however goofy or insignificant. As a player, he’s faced plenty of scrutiny over the years, especially when teams relied on him for volume shooting while his signature midrange game fell out of fashion around the league. As a friend or mentor to other players, his popularity is ubiquitous.

Johnson learned to appreciate him as a support system in Toronto, where they were both raising newborn daughters around the same time. They shared in the joy of fatherhood and the struggle of changing diapers late at night while also trying to thrive in the NBA. Playdates became a regular occasion. Amusement park trips. It was fulfilling and exhausting.

Then Johnson would watch his friend at work, and somehow he thought DeRozan seemed the same as always. He carried himself like a man unbothered by sleep deprivation. He found time for late-night individual workouts at the team facility. If not for what they were going through together, Johnson might not have realized DeRozan’s life had just changed.

“I call it the corner dog,” he said. “The corner dog is a dog on the street that don’t know where his next meal is gonna come from, doesn’t know how he survives, but he still makes it happen. I feel like that’s DeMar.”

“There were times I would get upset in a game, and he would come up and talk to me, just calming me down. … It was rare that he would really get riled up,” said Nikola Vucevic, who played with DeRozan both in college and the pros 12 years later. Early in their NBA careers, they stayed in touch, occasionally texting about how fun it would be to play together again. It was said half-jokingly, until it wasn’t. After Vucevic got traded to Chicago, he pushed for DeRozan, who was headed to free agency, to join him there.

“When I was at USC, my English wasn’t that great. I was really shy,” Vucevic said. “So we were good, but we weren’t that close. Reuniting in Chicago really brought us closer, talking about our families, getting to have a different perspective. We would go to dinner a lot.”

Ayo Dosunmu, a second-round pick in 2021, experienced him as a veteran in Chicago. He was due to have his jersey retired at the University of Illinois early in his rookie year, before he and DeRozan knew each other well. DeRozan heard about it the day of the ceremony. “All right, I’m gonna pull up,” Dosunmu remembers him saying. DeRozan made the two-hour journey to Champaign that night, sitting next to Dosunmu for the game.

“That was one of my favorite memories I have in the NBA so far because we did not have a big relationship. We had just met,” Dosunmu said. “It was genuine. … He treated everybody the same no matter how much you played, how much money you were paid.”

Over the next couple of years, Dosunmu would try to get under DeRozan’s skin, hoping to provoke the soft-spoken star to engage in trash talk. “Then he would score,” Dosunmu said, “and try his best to talk trash back to me.””

“Was he any good at it?”

““Uh,” Dosunmu said. “That’s subjective.”

DeRozan was a master of calm on the court, but away from it, he relished getting his teammates worked up. Vucevic remembers random sports debates going on in the locker room. DeRozan would observe quietly, biding his time. Then he would suddenly chime in with an outlandish opinion — something he didn’t necessarily believe — intentionally pouring fuel on the fire.”

“And then he’d go quiet,” Vucevic said. “He’s very smart. He analyzes everything. So he kind of reads the room, what’s going on, and then he’ll throw a little comment out. … Then everybody gets going, and he’ll just walk out laughing.”

“I don’t know where it comes from,” DeRozan said. “I’m big on just laughter, trying to find enjoyment in everything. I think maybe it’s my escape too from a lot of stuff.”

That perspective could apply to his new environment in Denver, where the Nuggets hope his wisdom will be as valuable as his talent. He’s known Aaron Gordon since the Nuggets fan favorite was about 10 years old — a friend’s energetic little brother, back then. DeRozan and Drew Gordon were in high school at the same time, and they got close while crossing paths in California basketball circles. DeRozan kept tabs on Aaron as his career took off. “Me and AG always had a dialogue and a certain respect level,” he said.

Gordon has quietly carried the grief of an unthinkable loss for two years, since Drew died at 33 in a car crash. He believes the pain has manifested physically during that time, as he suggested in an interview with 9News earlier this year. Recurring hamstring and calf injuries have derailed two consecutive playoff runs. It all feels connected to him.

DeRozan has played a major role in destigmatizing the subject of mental health around the NBA, particularly when he openly discussed his struggle with depression in 2018. He recognizes the value of having conversations about grief. He hopes his presence can be a source of comfort for Gordon — his kinship with Drew, his ability to share in the memories and the sadness.

He also knows that sometimes it’s therapeutic enough just to exist in an NBA locker room around friends.

“I played with him while his father was dying,” Gay said. “And you wouldn’t even know it.”

‘I still have a lot to give’

When DeRozan checks into the game for Denver on Thursday night, it will be his first NBA appearance off the bench since April 14, 2010, when he was a rookie. He has started 1,250 consecutive games, including in the playoffs, over 16 years.

“I got to a point in my career where it’s just like, I love the game,” he told The Post. “I love to hoop. I hoop all summer. I hoop with my kids. I just hoop. Every (label) that everybody else puts on it, that’s on them. To be able to play this game for almost two decades at a high level, be recognized, accomplish so much, I just look at it like nobody can ever take away nothing or put something on my career to make me feel less than, ever.”

It’s a weird feeling. The unfamiliarity of it. But he finds it more gratifying to be respected by his teammates and coaches — “that’s irreplaceable” — than it is to be a starter.

His lack of a championship ring looms, too, as he tips off his 18th season. It will certainly be a storyline if and when the Nuggets enter the playoffs. Their pedigree as a winning team was a key factor when DeRozan chose them over three other teams this summer. He hasn’t experienced playoff basketball since 2022. But he’s also confident his motivation to keep going at this stage of his career runs deeper than that.

He’s chasing something that he knows will be even more elusive than a championship a few years from now — the feeling that will go away when he can’t do what he loves anymore. The feeling of being the kid watching those tapes.

“I still have a lot to give,” he said. “I don’t want to short-cut or cheat the game. I think that for me means more than anything. For me just to still have that opportunity. (This is) not me feeling like, ‘Oh, I can take a back seat, let me just see where it’s taking me.’ Nah, it’s still me feeling like I can go out there and contribute and still give so much to the game that I love.”