DeRozan turned down better money elsewhere. He went looking for a title, and he signed for one year.
In an interview with Mirin Fader for The Athletic, he explained that the recruiting had happened over the phone, by the players themselves: Jokic, Murray, Gordon. According to Eurohoops, it was Jokic who weighed most on the final decision.
Let me tell you: in 2000, nobody called me to talk me into anything. Somebody rang once, to ask whether I could play the four, and I said yes because I was young. Then I arrived in Charleroi with one bag, in a hall with badminton lines on the floor. So when I read that three players pick up their phones one evening to tell a 37-year-old to come and play with them, I think that’s very good. It means they looked at the defence before the scoring.
Jokic comes out of a summer with Serbia: four games, four wins in qualifying for the 2027 World Cup. Last season he averaged 27.5 points, 12.9 rebounds and 10.6 assists a game. He is on a base salary of 59 million dollars through 2026-27, and he has put off signing an extension to stay within the terms of a record supermax.
Denver’s camp opens at the end of September, five pre-season games after that, then the 82, starting on 21 October at the Thunder, at the Paycom Center. David Adelman will run all of it.
I called my mother, in Indiana, on Sunday after dinner. I explained that over there it’s the players who phone around to recruit. She asked me who does the phoning at my place. I said: me, Sunday evening, four parents, to find out who is driving the minibus on Saturday. She said: then you do the same job as Jokic, you just have fewer assists. She said: see?
It’s true, we checked: Eurohoops.
