DeMar DeRozan knows what it’s like to play with hardly anybody watching and almost nobody really caring. When he arrived in Toronto in 2009, the Raptors were a year into missing the playoffs for five straight seasons. Chris Bosh left. The bottom fell out. For a long while, Raptorland was synonymous with irrelevance.
So maybe it took a little time to get used to the current reality of attention-soaked intensity.
Maybe it took two previous post-seasons of disappointment to set up Sunday night’s joyous moment of redemption, when DeRozan and the Raptors finally managed their first-ever Game 7 win.