DeMar DeRozan taking and making 3s could change everything we think about him

Watch this gif, and tell me DeMar DeRozan isn’t more confident shooting three-pointers than any other point of his career.

Enhance.

ENHANCE.

Yes, there it is. That’s a shooter with all the confidence in the world right now.

DeRozan stepped into that three-pointer late in the first quarter, and he finished that game with five total triples — plus a career-high and franchise-record 52 points. This is DeRozan’s best shooting season of his career, and that’s lifting the Raptors into a new stratosphere.

Specifically, DeRozan is averaging career highs in three-point makes, attempts, and percentage. Much of that comes from his recent hot streak over the past seven games, where DeRozan has hit 20 of 38 (52.6 percent) from behind the arc.

But perhaps this is a sign of what’s to come. Certainly, Toronto spent all offseason focusing on a changed approach that prioritized a quicker pace and, yes, more threes. DeRozan is slowly but surely joining the revolution.

Though DeRozan still picks his spots sparingly, he has shown real growth as a catch-and-shoot player, hitting 38 percent of his two attempts per game, per NBA.com’s tracking stats. After shooting about 16 percent on pull-up three-pointers the past four seasons, DeRozan is hitting 30 percent of them this season, too.

Let’s slow down for a moment: DeRozan’s 30 percent on pull-up threes is finally respectable, given the nature of that shot, but this isn’t him morphing into Stephen Curry. Even on a game-to-game basis, DeRozan hasn’t proven himself to be a dangerous three-point threat. In 35 games this season, DeRozan has only made at least one three in 14 of them.

DeRozan is built in the mold of a classic scorer, a 6’7 guard adept at nearly every two-pointer imaginable. But even Kobe Bryant was a better shooter from long range — Bryant, for his career, averaged more three-point makes and attempts than DeRozan is this season, which we’ve easily established as being his best shooting season yet.

Even though the Raptors stumbled into the Eastern Conference finals in 2016, there’s a sense that they’ve disappointed in the postseason. DeRozan and his costar Kyle Lowry have certainly both struggled to be themselves. After last season’s loss, even Toronto acknowledged it.

“After that performance, we need a culture reset here,” Raptors general manager Masai Ujiri said in his season ending media interview. “The style of play is something we need to change. I’ve made it clear. [Head coach Dwane Casey] has acknowledged it.”

You know what, though? DeRozan reliably hitting three-pointers might be exactly what he needs to change that. (You can also see Toronto’s improved spacing in the gif at the top — DeRozan initiates that pick and roll from about 30 feet and has plenty of room to step into a clean three-pointer.)

Hitting five three-pointers helped push DeRozan to a franchise record in his best ever game. There’s a good chance that DeRozan already is the greatest Raptor of all time, but the 28-year-old had never even surpassed 45 points before Monday, a surprisingly low number for that type of scorer.

We’ve known it all along, but that’s further proof that DeRozan hitting threes could vault his game to another level. This season so far — and really, this recent seven-game sample — isn’t enough to make any grand assumptions about how the rest of it might go.

But when you see DeRozan posed at the three-point line, shooting hand still hanging in the air, watching the shot he just launched with total confidence tear through the net, it makes you wonder whether this evolution is for real, and what that would mean if it was.