•DeRozan creating his own path with Raptors

•Blue Jays have mixed results retaining stars

•Marner hopes to stay in Toronto

TORONTO – Rarely is the free agency of a star athlete performing at his peak as relatively seamless as that of DeMar DeRozan. The all-star guard wanted to stay put, the Toronto Raptors wanted to keep him and once the NBA meat market opened last summer only 25 minutes of discussion were needed for the sides to arrive at a $137.5-million, five-year deal. No complications like testing the market, listening to other offers and examining alternatives necessary.

“There never really was an approach to free agency, for me,” says DeRozan. “Midway through the season, when I was getting questions (about the future), I never thought about anything else, my mindset was never anywhere else. We lost in the Eastern Conference Finals and I was thinking about what I’ve got to do this summer so we can be better and get back to this point, or even further. My whole thought process on free agency was really none.”

The way things played out stands in stark contrast to the ugly and avoidable divorce the Toronto Blue Jays and Edwin Encarnacion endured this winter, and the club’s subsequent disjointed reunion with another franchise icon in Jose Bautista. As fans of the city’s sports teams know all too well, things get complicated when the loyalty between star player and club, the business of sports and the desire of fans intersect. Messy exits in recent memory include those of Vince Carter, Chris Bosh, Mats Sundin, Carlos Delgado and Roy Halladay, each leaving significant scars. By and large, the athletes who make a mark don’t hang them up here.

That’s why the past few months in the Six have been so intriguing. DeRozan positioned himself as an outlier and stayed. Encarnacion left. Bautista pushed back the drama a year. And the Toronto Maple Leafs drafted Auston Matthews then watched the brilliant centre plus the mesmerizing Mitch Marner emerge into championship-calibre cornerstones. Given that they are only at the entry point of the sports-career cycle, the bigger-picture questions remain years away. Eventually though, the team and players will face the same issues DeRozan and the Raptors and Encarnacion and Bautista and the Blue Jays have wrestled recently, the relationship between star and the city again put to the test.

DeRozan ‘all in’ with Raptors

Last summer Tim Duncan and Kobe Bryant walked away from the NBA having done something very few pro athletes manage to accomplish – spending their entire careers with one franchise. Going wire-to-wire in the same spot is, of course, the stuff of saccharine sports-writer narrative, as more than ever pro sports are a cold, heartless business. Modern analytics and vast improvements in objective analysis are only making things more cut-throat as players are increasingly managed like securities on the financial market. Today’s executives must know when to hold, buy or sell while limiting subjectivity.

Star athletes who left Toronto Vince Carter, trade to New Jersey, 2004

Carlos Delgado, free agent signing, 2005

Mats Sundin, free agent signing, 2008

Roy Halladay, trade to Philadelphia, 2009

Chris Bosh, trade to Miami, 2010

Edwin Encarnacion, free agent signing, 2016



“It’s just the way the business goes,” DeRozan says of the NBA’s roster churn. “So many guys year-in, year-out are coming into the sport and your window is always closing smaller and smaller every year, so the opportunity is not as great for the organization or the player to stick through that. Luck has to be involved, timing, everything has to fall into place for that to happen that way.”

Certainly all those elements aligned for DeRozan, who at 27 is only getting better as the Raptors enjoy the best competitive window in franchise history. Re-signing the player was the obvious choice for a team that pushed the eventual NBA-champion Cleveland Cavaliers to six games in the Eastern Conference Finals. And though there was a year of speculation that the native of Compton, Calif., would head home to Los Angeles and take over from Bryant with the Lakers, such talk was more a product of the chattering classes than anything of substance.

“For me, it didn’t matter what someone else did, I never followed a trend,” says DeRozan. “I could have been playing in Alaska – once I have the mindset I’m all in, I’m all in through good and bad. That’s a credit to the type of person I am, so once I got drafted here, I was all in. That was always my mindset. It was never, ‘What if I played here?’ I never had questions about going anywhere else. That made everything easy for me with going through the tough times, and enjoying the good times, as well – having that mentality from the get.”

“I never thought about anything else, my mindset was never anywhere else.”

The Raptors drafted DeRozan ninth overall in 2009 and he has steadily improved over the past eight years, becoming an all-star for the first time in 2013-14. Any team would want to retain a player on that type of trajectory. But the Raptors could take additional comfort in knowing they were committing to peak-performance years in his contract, a dynamic that will be different when all-star point guard and fellow franchise pillar Kyle Lowry hits free agency at 31 this summer. DeRozan arrived at free agency as a proven performer and at an age where he could still offer more upside, as he’s shown this season.

“It all comes with timing, the work you put in to want to be a great player and not an average player, to where you feel like you’re something that can’t be moved at some point,” DeRozan says. “You want to establish yourself and lay a mark down and that was my sense that at the end of the day, whatever decision is made, I’d rather it be made on my terms and not forced through someone else. That’s why I worked so hard, so I can have that ability to have that option.”

Ultimately, the different elements aligned to provide DeRozan the control to not simply follow in Bryant’s footsteps by signing with the Lakers, but to continue crafting his own story in Toronto. It’s here that he grew into a husband, a father and an integral part of local basketball’s growth and development. There’s a substantial meaning in that for him, and a deeper sense of purpose such a two-way commitment provides.

“You don’t see guys staying somewhere their whole career, so when you do see it, you really appreciate it because you sacrifice everything in your life to be in that place,” he explains. “That’s how I look at it. You want to look at legacies to where I want to create my own road, I don’t want to ever follow someone else’s road and what they did, because you’re going to get overlooked or overshadowed someway because of the previous road. It just happened that it worked out perfectly here.”



Blue Jays lose one icon, keep another

Like DeMar DeRozan, Edwin Encarnacion wanted to stay put and finish out his career with the Blue Jays, and ensure his place on the Rogers Centre’s Level of Excellence (which is probably deserved at this point, regardless). What has made his departure so hard to swallow for some fans is that no team made a better offer than the $80-million, four-year deal with an option for a potential fifth year at $20 million tabled to him by the Blue Jays. But because of timing issues and miscalculations (we’ll leave it to you to play the blame game), the elite slugger ended up taking a three-year deal from Cleveland that guarantees him $60 million with the potential for a fourth year that could push the total to $80 million.

A reasonable outcome for the player, but bottom line, this is a split that never should have happened.

Yet, here we are, Encarnacion cracking jokes about his signature walking-the-parrot home run trot clearing immigration shortly after donning a Cleveland jersey for the first time this month. Blue Jays fans, meanwhile, are still reconciling themselves to life with Kendrys Morales, Steve Pearce and a compensatory draft pick instead, although Jose Bautista’s return on an $18.5-million, one-year deal that includes two options softened the blow.

Still, to some fans seeking reciprocity after the Blue Jays led the American League in attendance at 3,392,099 last year and then hiked ticket prices for a third straight year, losing Encarnacion left a let-down feel to this strategically approached off-season.

Like the Raptors, the Blue Jays have been riding high of late, ending their 21-year post-season drought in 2015 and making consecutive trips to the American League Championship Series for only the second time in franchise history. But their calculus with Encarnacion and Bautista, who was well down their list of alternatives in the outfield before he re-signed, is different than that of the Raptors with DeRozan on a number of levels.

First and foremost is that with Encarnacion set to play next season at 34 and Bautista at 36, both are likely headed into their decline years. How steep and significant that decline looks is impossible to predict accurately – think how many times David Ortiz was written off before he posted monster numbers – but with an already aging roster, the Blue Jays had to be cautious in tying themselves down to too many big contracts for players outside their peak.

On the other hand, there’s also the value of the bond fans have with icons like Encarnacion and Bautista, and whether there’s a debt of loyalty both ways between team and player. Those are very delicate issues existing largely in grey. As club president and CEO Mark Shapiro told me Nov. 8, “It’s never easy to answer that question and there’s always some premium placed on players that have historical impact and whose character and talent we know well. You’re balancing that premium with the understanding that those players on a losing team have limited value or meaning to anyone.”

A prime example of that for the Blue Jays came in October 2000 when they gave a $68-million, four-year extension to Carlos Delgado, briefly making him the game’s highest-paid player. While the parallels aren’t perfect – Rogers Communications Inc., had just purchased the club, retaining the slugger made a strong impression on fans and he was entering his prime – the Blue Jays were never able to build sufficiently around him, even as he performed to his contract.

A year later, J.P. Ricciardi replaced Gord Ash as general manager, started a large-scale rebuild amid a significant reduction in payroll, and Delgado was left hanging as an anchor on the roster even as he delivered the goods. In his walk year, he invoked his no-trade clause to prevent a pre-trade-deadline deal and the club received no compensation when he left as a free agent, declining to offer him arbitration out of fear he’d accept.

Ultimately, the quick pivot in organizational direction meant any benefit from fan goodwill related to the extension evaporated almost instantaneously, and the Blue Jays never maximized a prime asset either on the field or through trade.

“I thought it was a good deal, I thought it was a fair deal and the length of the deal was also a value in our minds,” says Ash, who signed Delgado to the extension. “You’ve got to layer it on the premise that it was ownership change time, new ownership wanted to make their presence felt and that was part of it, too.

“Through that period of time one of our chief weaknesses was that there was no plan. You talk to guys today, they’ll tell you they have a one-year plan, a three-year plan and a five-year plan and they know where they’re headed. The Blue Jays at that time, for a lot of different reasons, probably mostly because of ownership (Interbrew S.A. owned the team before Rogers), you didn’t know month-to-month what you were doing, never mind year-to-year.”

This off-season, had the Blue Jays re-signed Encarnacion with Russell Martin and Troy Tulowitzki on the books at $20 million per in each of the next three years, they’d be significantly tied down over the coming seasons. That would make pivoting in approach, if necessary, all the more difficult. A long-term deal for Bautista would have similarly complicated things, but since the first of the two options in his deal – worth $17 million with a $500,000 buyout for 2018 – is a mutual one, there’s no real commitment beyond this season.

“Everybody would love to be on a long-term deal. But you get what you can get.”

In structuring things that way, the Blue Jays, Bautista or both can easily change course. A fair argument can be made that it’s a prudent way to try and keep open a window of opportunity that could soon start closing. On the flip side, there’s a similarly valid argument that a player like Bautista, who during the not-so-long-ago lean times was one of the few reasons to come to the ballpark, deserves to finish his career in Toronto. “I feel like Bautista is Blue Jays baseball,” Marcus Stroman says recently, and he’s not wrong.

Regardless, the angst created by the uncertainty over his future resumes next fall, if not sooner. “Everybody would love to be on a long-term deal. But you get what you can get,” says Bautista. “The most important thing is being happy and being where you are. And I’m happy and where I want to be.”

Marner optimistic about future with Leafs



Mitch Marner knows full well the recent heartache this city has experienced with its sporting stars. The 19-old winger counts former Maple Leafs captains Doug Gilmour and Mats Sundin as players he tries to model himself after. When he thinks back to his reaction when Sundin left the Maple Leafs and signed as a free agent with the Vancouver Canucks, he says, “kind of shocking, but it’s a business – people want to win Stanley Cups.”

Still, even for athletes of Marner’s generation who have known nothing but the era of ceaseless roster turnover in pro sports, the notion of spending his entire career with one team isn’t foreign. “I still think it’s realistic,” he says earnestly. “Growing up in Toronto, every kid’s dream is to play for their hometown team. I’ve always loved watching the team play and hopefully I can do that and stay with this team my whole career. But day in, day out, it’s just making sure I’m working hard and giving myself the best chance to do that.”

If what Marner and Auston Matthews have shown so far in their rookie seasons is only the starting point for them, the Maple Leafs have a legitimately bright future. And if their rebuild actually comes to fruition, the duo will own Toronto the way Gilmour and Sundin once did, given the overwhelming local passion for the hockey team and pent-up desire for a winner.

At the same time, that’s a lot to put on a pair of teenagers, especially in a place that’s notoriously torn down many “cornerstone” Maple Leafs in recent years – Phil Kessel and Dion Phaneuf front and centre in that regard. Failure is excruciating in any professional sports setting, but failure tied with the burden of history only amplifies the difficulties for both players and management. Win and you’re a legend, lose and you’re a fraud. Fairly or not, Marner and Matthews are now carrying the hope that this rebuild will eventually lead to the Maple Leafs’ first Stanley Cup since 1967.

“Growing up in Toronto, every kid’s dream is to play for their hometown team.”

Already, Marner has learned to stickhandle through the traffic. Playing his junior hockey with the OHL’s London Knights helped prepare him for the bright lights of a major market, although he admits here “there are a lot more cameras and stuff like that.”

Stuff like that includes legions of new fans eager to chat with him when they spot him in the city. “Every time you get stopped on the road, it’s making sure you’re not just trying to rush by,” Marner says of coping with the extra attention. “Talk to people, take care of people. They look up to you, they love what you do on and off the ice. Stay as nice as possible, take time out of your day for people that take time out of their day to watch you play hockey.”

With such a sensible outlook, plus a skillset and on-ice creativity that dazzles, the three-way intersection between city, team and emerging star certainly looks promising. But the NHL’s harsh realities loom, and whether all three remain in alignment once he and Matthews are out of their entry-level contracts and salary-cap matters enter the fray over the medium- and long-term is impossible to know.

“It’s your life, you’ve got to make the right decisions,” says Marner. “Make the right decision on the team you want to go to if you decide to leave, and obviously it depends on the person and what they’re feeling like. But there’s a business side to this game as well, which everyone knows, and it’s making sure that when you make a decision you talk with your family so it’s the right one.”

A city evolves

Midway through the first season of his extension, DeMar DeRozan has not a single doubt about his decision. Since joining the Raptors, he’s gone from a young man clueless about the business of the NBA to an all-star and Olympian in control of his fate within the NBA system. There’s a long way to go, but he has a legitimate opportunity to be one the very few star players to spend his entire career with a Toronto sports team.

Leaning against a wall post-practice at the Raptors’ BioSteel Centre, relaxed in a grey hoodie and sweatpants, he mulls over a question about his tenure here. “What do I most appreciate?” he repeats.

“How there weren’t any buildings built downtown like there are now. How there wasn’t a practice facility here. How you’ve just seen the whole city evolve,” says DeRozan. “You go from seeing these young guys playing basketball in the summertime here to all of a sudden being in the NBA, you just appreciate all that because in the moment, you don’t realize how everything is evolving around you. The times I get a chance to look back and see Toronto fans when we’re in the States playing certain places, you hear people chanting, ‘Raptors’ and wearing Raptors jerseys no matter where we’re at, that’s something I see that wasn’t there when I first came. When I look at it that way, it makes you feel good.”

The same goes for the city he stars in.