"I couldn't watch": DeRozan says he didn't tune in to Raptors' NBA title win
In just about every interview former Toronto Raptors star DeMar DeRozan has done over the last half-decade, he’s always asked some variation of the same question: what if?
In one of the most directly impactful trades in sports history, DeRozan was shipped (alongside Jakob Poeltl and a series of draft picks) to the San Antonio Spurs from the Raptors in exchange for Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green in the summer of 2018.
Toronto, of course, won its first NBA title less than a year later, knocking off the Golden State Warriors in a gruelling six-game NBA Finals.
In a recent interview on The 25/10 Show with former NFL stars DeSean Jackson and LeSean McCoy, DeRozan said he actually wasn’t tuned in when Toronto lifted the title.
“I couldn’t watch,” DeRozan told the hosts.
During DeRozan’s time in Toronto, the franchise reached its first NBA Conference Finals in 2016 but had been eliminated three seasons in a row by the Cleveland Cavaliers, who represented the Eastern Conference in the NBA Finals from 2014-2018.
“It f***ed me up,” DeRozan said. “This the reason it f***ed me up because we couldn’t beat one person, we couldn’t beat [LeBron James], you know what I mean? We’d run into Bron and we just couldn’t beat him. So the year when I got traded… he went to the Lakers. So I was more so mad like give it one more shot. If we had one more, in my mind, that was the whole thing. Like we’ve got this sh*t now. We gonna win it next year. That was the whole thing.”
DeRozan spent three seasons in San Antonio before eventually signing with the Chicago Bulls, while Poeltl spent four-and-a-half years there before eventually being traded back to Toronto at the 2023 trade deadline.
“I took it personally,” DeRozan added about the trade. “It took me a while to get over it. It’s easy to talk about it now, I don’t feel no way about it but in that moment it f**ked me up because I was like ‘You worked so hard, this is the place you wanted to be, you put everything into it, everything was centred around me.'”
The full interview is available below:
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