DeMar DeRozan Did the Damn Thing in Raptors' Season Opener

If there was any residual sticker shock from the five-year, $137.5 million contract DeMar DeRozan signed this offseason ahead of the Toronto Raptors' season opener on Wednesday, it's likely gone now.

That contract is an absurd amount of money in real dollars, and it's a shade over 90 percent of a maximum contract in the NBA, eating up 28 percent of the team's salary cap. DeRozan is not a perfect player, and contracts that large tend to assume some risk for players a tier below the league's elite. Market forces and reasons both on the court and off necessitated the deal, and the new season should be occasion to cease with arguments about the merits of the contract, at least temporarily.

DeRozan surely wasn't thinking about shifting the focus from the offseason to actual games while leading the Raptors to a resounding 109-91 victory over the Detroit Pistons, but in a masterful 34 minutes he showed exactly why the Raptors put their faith in—and bet their future on—him.

The Pistons' defense had no answer for one of the most surgical performances of DeRozan's eight-year career. With a mix of drives and runners, post-ups and pull-ups, turnarounds and fadeaways, DeRozan eviscerated what should be a roughly average defensive outfit. When the buzzer sounded signaling the end of the third quarter, a gassed DeRozan had already set a franchise record for season openers with 40 points.

He wouldn't score in his somewhat brief fourth-quarter appearance—the Raptors pulled away, and Jonas Valanciunas surged to his own career-best mark of 32—leaving DeRozan two points shy of his personal high, set in March 2015. Even short of that high-water mark, this ranks as one of the best performances of DeRozan's career, a 17-of-27 assault on the supposed and oft-celebrated death of the mid-range game.

DeRozan's shot chart isn't exactly what those in analytics departments are looking for, devoid of triples and with few free-throw attempts by DeRozan's lofty standards. But the Compton native has long thrived by taking exactly what modern defenses want to give an opponent, firing more long twos than just about anyone in the NBA. That he pushed his scoring efficiency past league-average markers last year is an enormous development given his near-30-percent usage rate, as being able to score with moderate efficiency at a vast volume is exceptionally difficult. And valuable.

The degree of difficulty on the shots DeRozan made Wednesday is astounding, too. The strength, footwork, and body control DeRozan exhibits to free himself from a defender on the block or driving baseline are unique skills, and while there's an argument for taking better shots, it's tough to deny Wednesday's results, especially given how the Pistons sold out to try to keep DeRozan from the rim.

That DeRozan was 0-of-5 on easier catch-and-shoot attempts is equal parts shocking, given his final line, and fitting. There are players who score more efficiently but few who do so more dynamically, creating a sort of DeMar DiSsonance with a lot of his shot attempts. On days those only-in-2K shots aren't falling, it can be frustrating. On days like Wednesday when they are, it's, in the words of Raptors rookie Pascal Siakam, poetry.

Ironically, Wednesday's game also presented one of the best arguments to decrease DeRozan's occasional dominion over the offence: Valanciunas' own statement game, in which he made Frikadėlės of Andre Drummond, Aron Baynes, Jon Leuer, and Boban Marjanovic. On a night when Kyle Lowry's shot wasn't falling, Valanciunas came up big in support of DeRozan's efforts, with the pair becoming the first teammates in NBA history to go for 40 and 30 on an opening night.

For as incredible as DeRozan's game was, Valanciunas' may be a more important signal about the ultimate success of the Raptors. DeRozan won't be this on every night, and it will be the continued recognition of Valanciunas that could sustain the offence when he isn't.