Look, I’m as big a fan of DeMar DeRozan as anybody. When he was a senior in high school, I wrote a feature on him in Dime #39 that is still one of my favorite stories I’ve done. He’s a good guy, comes from a good family, is an incredible athlete and I think he will be a legit star in the NBA beyond just a sick dunker.
So I’m not hating on him. But everybody needs to settle down with the “DeRozan got robbed!” movement following last night’s Slam Dunk Contest. Because DeRozan did not get robbed.
DeRozan’s second dunk of the first round — an off-the-bounce reverse cuff that I originally described as a cross between Jason Richardson and Michael Jordan in their primes — was the best dunk of the night, in my opinion, and deservedly got a 50. It was his first dunk that kept him out of the finals and away from a chance to unseat pre-contest favorite Blake Griffin. As a dunk itself, the between-the-legs dunk after catching a lob off the basket support was sick. But DeRozan only got a 44 because it took him and Amir Johnson so many tries to execute it that everyone in the Staples Center started checking their Birdman meter.
Was the 44 on DeRozan’s first dunk a robbery? No. Although later dunks by other players got higher scores after just as many (or more) failed attempts — e.g., JaVale McGee‘s three-ball dunk — that was because by that point, the judges were not penalizing dunkers anymore for misses. They really couldn’t, after McGee got a 50 for his two-ball, two-rim dunk that took several tries and Griffin got a 49 for his first dunk. Unfortunately for DeRozan, his try-try-try-again moment was the first dunk of the contest. The precedent had not yet been set that we were going to see a lot of misses. So he was penalized for killing some early crowd buzz, and likely because the judges assumed that not everybody else would be missing everything too. It doesn’t seem fair, but it’s understandable. The first guy on the clock is always in a tough position, also because there hasn’t yet been a scale set as to what is a 45, what’s a 50, etc. Each contest takes on a life of its own.
And besides, why did DeRozan pick a power forward (Johnson) to throw him the lob? I know DeMar and Amir are tight, but Jose Calderon and Jerryd Bayless get paid millions of dollars to put passes where they’re supposed to be. Even DeMar’s other homeboy, Sonny Weems, has some experience assisting dunk contest participants from his work with J.R. Smith.
I would have liked to see DeMar get into the finals and try more than two dunks. And if this Slam Dunk Contest were done under rule changes I suggested, we might have been able to see that. But DeRozan didn’t get robbed. At worst, it was a misdemeanor.
