Spurs dodged a bullet in not bringing back former All-Star after Play-In debacle

Back in the dog days of the summer, there were fairy tales abound about the San Antonio Spurs. The trade and free agent rumors were never-ending. When there's that much talk, it's difficult to know what's real and what's not, but the one about DeMar DeRozan seemed more real than most.

What ended up happening was DeRozan agreeing to a sign-and-trade to head to Sacramento, and the Spurs wound up with Harrison Barnes in a deal where they were pretty much gifted the perfect veteran to help facilitate the move. It was the best thing for San Antonio, and the Kings' swift exit from the NBA Play-In Tournament only reinforces that opinion.

DeRozan puts your team in purgatory as the first option

Deebo is a talented scorer and a great person, but his style of play isn't going to take a team anywhere. He gets the majority of his shots out of the mid-range, and he's good at it. There is something to the notion that you don't want to fix what's not broken, but he's never truly adapted to the game of today, and it only dooms his teams.

When you look at his box score, you'll see that he scored 33 points, so your first thought is to claim that he did everything he could to win the game. However, he took 28 shots to get those points. Zach LaVine took 19 shots, and Domantas Sabonis took 13. That's a total of 60 shots between three players, and the team attempted 89 for the whole game.

When the other players are watching the basketball, that often because their star needs 28 shots to get 33 points, they're not as into the game defensively. They're doing too much standing around and watching the DeRozan shoot to be energized to compete with high energy on the other end.

The past few seasons, DeMar has been alongside Zach LaVine in Chicago. They've already tried this experiment out there, and it didn't go well. They lost to the Miami Heat in the play-in two years in a row. Now, the two of them moved over to Sacramento to do the same exact thing.

Quite honestly, the best thing for DeRozan's career would be to accept the role of sixth man early and get himself onto a contender where he can thrive by blasting secondary units. He's not going to win a championship as the star player on a team, but he could do it as a reserve who stars in his role. He's 35 years old, so it's not too early, but his pride could cause the move to be too late.

Since he just signed that 3-year deal, "late" is the most likely scenario. So, expect to continue seeing great regular season highlights of DeRozan getting buckets and early exits in the play in or playoffs. He's good enough to now allow you to drop low enough for a high lottery pick, but not good enough to lead you to a title. That's purgatory.