DeRozan told Stephen A. Smith he feels the Raptors would’ve still won the 2019 NBA Finals if they’d never traded for Kawhi Leonard.
Kawhi Leonard may have only spent one season with the Toronto Raptors, but he achieved all that he set out to during his short stay up North.
But just how responsible was the addition of Leonard toward the Raptors winning the NBA Finals in 2019?
If you ask DeMar DeRozan, he might tell you that Leonard wasn’t the catalyst behind Toronto’s first and only championship in franchise history. DeRozan had been traded to the San Antonio Spurs ahead of the 2018–19 season, but he thinks that he could’ve helped the Raptors win a championship if he stayed and the team hadn’t traded for Leonard.
During an appearance on First Take on Wednesday, host Stephen A. Smith noted that LeBron James had been Toronto’s “kryptonite” in previous postseasons and asked DeRozan if he thought he could’ve won a championship with the Raptors after James left the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Los Angeles Lakers.
DeMar DeRozan believes he would have won a championship with the Raptors if the Kawhi Leonard trade never happened:
“I have no doubt in my mind the same outcome would have happened.”
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“Yeah, never to discredit those guys––they won it, they deserve it. I finally had gotten to a point where I was happy for them. But for sure, I definitely feel like that. The only person we couldn’t beat was LeBron, that’s just what it was. And I felt, off the year we had before, we just needed one more piece to kind of push over the top, and that piece came to be LeBron going to the West. I didn’t get an opportunity to see what would’ve happened, but the utmost confidence within myself, I have no doubt in my mind the same outcome would have happened.”
The Raptors had been eliminated by LeBron’s Cavaliers in each of the previous three postseasons, once in the Eastern Conference Finals and twice in the semifinals. Although it’s entirely a “what if” situation, DeRozan made clear he feels that Toronto could’ve experienced the same success had he not been dealt to the Spurs in exchange for Leonard.