Not everyone agrees with how much spite DeMar DeRozan had invested in the grudge he continues to hold against the Toronto Raptors and, more specifically, their General Manager for making a business decision in trading him as the face of a franchise he helped to resurrect. The truth is, seeing as they weren't the ones scorned, they probably shouldn't. Loyalty can't be considered a lost art in professional sports, because that would mean that those in professional sports were looking for it to be found. The business of winning has become far too cutthroat for emotions to be prioritized, so any pledge that wasn't put in writing is one that's liable to be broken. The Raptors owed DeMar DeRozan nothing more than what he was contractually inclined to, and he wasn't contractually inclined to...well...respect. Regardless of how you feel about feelings, that's just a fact. All that being said, if you had to pick a sympathetic party in the battle of friends-turned-foes then it absolutely had to be the player that inherently understands the concept of sympathy as opposed to the one whose idea of interpersonal relationships was poorly learned through computer programming. Simply put, watching DeMar DeRozan derive the sweet, sweet joy of revenge out of his successful pursuit of his first career triple-double was cooler than anything Kawhi Leonard could have delivered through a dead-panned expression. Whether or not that means the latter deserved to be booed in his return to a city he both helped bring a championship and basically ghosted is certainly up for debate, but whether or not the former was playing with a profound and palpable purpose in cranking back and hammering down dunks like the following was undoubtedly not...
As far as who won the trade is concerned, the Raptors are in the lead with Kawhi Leonard quietly (as if there were any other way for him to do so) returning to freakish form and Toronto looking like an Eastern Conference frontrunner. However, DeMar DeRozan won last night, both statistically, vindictively, and - if you like the players you root for to have a familiar emotional attachment to the teams you root for - deservedly. Especially as he compares to the guy that proceeded to point the finger at the media for the heat he took after mutedly going MIA...
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Categories
All
Archives
January 2020
|