DeRozan is so good these days.
Him and Curry named players of the week and deservedly so.
Turns out his dad has life-threatening kidney issues last few weeks and he's been flying back and forth to NY.
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“I’m pretty sure everyone in here goes through life situations,” DeRozan said following practice in New York. “You live on this earth, you’re going to have some type of issue that occurs that’s close to you. It’s just a matter of how you handle it, how you go about it. I go about mine like a man, like a professional. I don’t complain. I don’t cry about it. I don’t make excuses. These are things you just got to handle.”
Asked how his father is, DeRozan doesn’t mix words. “He’s still here. That’s all that matters,” DeRozan said.
Twice this season, DeRozan has left the Raptors to fly home to be with his ailing father. That DeRozan is in the midst of one of the best stretches of basketball of his successful career with that going on speaks to his ability to separate one from the other.
“I just go out and play,” DeRozan siad. “I don’t think about the run (he’s on), I don’t think about nothing. I just love playing basketball. When you get in that zone and you are just going out there playing ball you are able to zone out and be in a different space than you are throughout the rest of the day doing anything else. Basketball is always that realm for me where I can just get in that mindset of feeling free.”
For DeRozan this is just one more thing life has thrown at him that he has to learn to cope with.
“I grew up in Compton, California, man,” DeRozan said. “Every day was a challenge for me. That’s all I’ve known my whole life. It’s not a surprise for me. It’s not something that’s going to hold me down. I fight through adversity anywhere it comes in my life. It’s nothing new to me.”
As for his dad, DeRozan sums up that relationship simply.
“He is everything,” DeRozan said. “My dad put the basketball in my hands. My dad took me to the park. My dad pushed me. My dad was my dad. My dad was the reason I wanted to play sports, just like every other kid that looked up to their dad. That’s what he is to me to this day, and what he is to me forever.”
As impressed as head coach Dwane Casey is with the way his all-star guard is handling his situation, he too looks at the basketball court as a kind of escape for DeRozan at times like these.
“This is his refuge here and he should use this as a refuge to get away from his issues and problems for those two hours,” Casey said. “But if he has to get away and go home for his family he knows he has the organization’s support to do that,” Casey said.
