Three teams that spent the summer chasing LeBron James have landed on the same fallback, and only two of them are actually nursing a loss. LeBron James chose the Philadelphia 76ers over the Warriors, Cavaliers, Heat and Timberwolves, the final domino in the LeBron circus that ate the entire offseason. Cleveland and Miami were real finalists — they cleared cap room, ran the pitch, and lost. Denver wasn’t in that room at all. All three want DeMar DeRozan now anyway, and the gap between two front offices genuinely licking a wound and one that just needed a body is the actual story here, not whether DeRozan fits any of these rosters.
He might not, for what it’s worth. DeRozan turns 37 in a matter of days, and he’s a score-first wing who built a long, good career on a shot profile the modern league keeps trying to legislate out of existence. That tension is exactly why three teams that all just missed on the best player alive landed on the same name. He’s available. He’s competent. He doesn’t require anyone to explain the plan to their fanbase in more than a sentence, and in the panic of late July, that’s worth more to a front office than a clean spacing fit.
DeRozan spent last season averaging 18.4 points and 4.1 assists across 77 games for Sacramento, shooting close to 50 percent from the field, Hoopswire noted in its rundown of suitors. The Kings waived him July 6, a cap-clearing move both sides worked out together after trade talks stalled, per ESPN. No grievance, no drama, just an expensive veteran getting cut loose by a team that needed the number off its books. He hit the open market right as three separate front offices needed a headline that wasn’t “we lost” — and that timing is doing more work here than his stat line.
Miami is the more obvious of the two wounded bidders. The Heat were one of LeBron’s four finalists and came away with nothing. Per Shams Charania, they’re now also monitoring Klay Thompson’s buyout situation while they chase DeRozan, a front office running two backup plans at once because the first one didn’t land. (Miami has run this play before: swing for the star, land on a name recognizable enough to hold the back page, and insist the whole time that this was the plan all along.) DeRozan gives Miami a name the fanbase already respects, which matters more than fit right now, when the story a front office tells is still more important than the roster it’s actually building.
Cleveland’s version is quieter and, honestly, sharper. The Cavaliers are also working the Jonathan Kuminga trade market and see DeRozan less as a centerpiece than as bench scoring, Hoopswire reported, a stopgap who doesn’t threaten whatever timeline the front office is actually protecting. That’s a team trying not to look desperate after missing on the best player alive, and it’s the more disciplined consolation prize of the two, even if it’s still a consolation prize. (Cleveland fans have earned the right to be suspicious of any plan a front office describes as “disciplined.”) The Cavaliers aren’t rebuilding around DeRozan. They’re hedging around him, which is a different decision than the one Miami is making, even if the box score ends up looking the same in October.
Denver is the outlier, and this is where the story actually gets interesting. The Nuggets reached out to LeBron within a day of him telling the Lakers he was leaving, per Yahoo Sports, but discussions never got past the early stages — Denver simply didn’t have the cap room to make a real offer. They fell out of the race before it reached the finalist stage, per SI.com’s reporting. Per Shams Charania, the teams “receiving the most attention” were Cleveland, Miami and Philadelphia. Not Denver. So when the Nuggets show up chasing DeRozan, that isn’t a franchise processing a loss. It’s a cap-strapped roster doing what cap-strapped rosters do every July: reaching for whatever recognizable name still fits under the exception they’ve got left. (I live here. I don’t root here. Nobody in this city thought the Nuggets were walking away with LeBron, and I think that’s exactly why the DeRozan pursuit reads as a shrug locally, not a wound.)
Charania’s reporting captured the three-team convergence in a single post:
https://twitter.com/TheHeatCentral/status/2081833292211597360
Three teams, one name, and three very different reasons for wanting him.
I think what we’re watching has less to do with whether DeRozan fits than with what a front office owes its fans in the six weeks after a superstar says no. He doesn’t need the three-point line to work, and reporters framing this as a search for shooting are being generous. Miami needs a name that reads as an answer instead of a shrug. Cleveland needs a bridge that won’t threaten a timeline it’s still protecting. Denver needs a body, and DeRozan happens to be a recognizable one. Those are three different problems wearing the same solution, and that’s exactly why it’s easy to mistake a name for a plan. It’s also why none of the three will ever describe it that plainly.
Watch where DeRozan actually signs, not who’s linked to him. A deal with Cleveland tells you the Cavaliers are managing a timeline. A deal with Miami tells you the Heat needed a name more than a roadmap. A deal with Denver tells you nothing beyond the fact that a cap-strapped team found a taker for whatever it had left, which in a summer this loud might be the most honest transaction in the league. For the rest of this summer’s NBA free agency moves, keep an eye on which of these three actually pulls the trigger first, and how fast each one stops talking about why.
