Despite being a successful NBA player, DeMar DeRozan still deals with mental health issues.
It is extremely difficult to be drafted into the NBA.
It is even more difficult to have a long and fruitful career.
And it is even more challenging to become a star in the league.
DeMar DeRozan did all three.
He was drafted by the Toronto Raptors in 2009 with the ninth overall pick and didn’t have a high ceiling. Though scouts believed he had a ton of potential, they also didn’t see him unlocking it.
And in his rookie season, he proved them right. He struggled against the best in the world and averaged just under 9 points a game. He also didn’t provide much else.
By the time the offseason came around, he knew he had to improve if he wanted to stick around the NBA for a while. So, he took on the challenge of being a professional and devoted himself to basketball. He trained day in and day out. He made working on his basketball skills and conditioning a daily habit.
The following season, the effects of the training kicked in. He nearly doubled his points per game by averaging 17.2 points. He also averaged 3.8 rebounds, 1.8 assists, and 1 steal -all improvements from the previous campaign.
After seeing the successful results of the deliberate training, he continued to put in the work every offseason thereafter.
Eventually, DeRozan became an All-Star. But more importantly, he was leading the Raptors to the playoffs perennially while also helping them secure the top seeds in the Eastern Conference.
But while he was on this journey, he faced some difficult times. He dealt with depression and anxiety and didn’t openly talk about it until he was a few years into his career.
In 2018, he tweeted “This depression get the best of me…”
You may look at DeRozan and think, “What? Him? He deals with depression and anxiety? But he’s so successful!”
I sure did when I found out.
But everyone deals with things. It doesn’t matter how strong-willed or strong-minded you are –every single person goes through things. And a lot of people will try to deal with it themselves and won’t talk about it.
This is why DeRozan decided to become more vocal about his struggles with mental health.
He wanted people to know that it’s normal to feel shitty sometimes and okay to talk about it.
Via The Ringer:
“He’s one of the people that made it OK to talk about [mental health]. To understand that it’s something that needs to be dealt with,” Gregg Popovich, his former coach with the Spurs, says, “and it doesn’t diminish you as an individual to be able to state that. It actually gives you strength and helps a whole lot of other people. And he knew that.”
DeRozan has since become the lead advocate for mental health in the NBA. He encourages players -and people from all walks of life- to talk about their struggles, to know that they don’t have to deal with it alone.
His former Raptor teammate, Fred VanVleet, even went as far as stating that DeRozan was the catalyst for the NBA to start raising awareness about mental health.
Via Sportsnet:
“He changed a billion dollar business,” Toronto Raptors guard Fred VanVleet said Saturday. “He changed it pretty much single-handedly [by] speaking out. And then obviously a lot of guys felt more comfortable, and that’s what it’s about. So for him to do that was huge and we won’t know the impact, we’ll never know the impact, but we just know that it’s a great impact that he had on the league and on guys, on players, coaching staff, whoever — that this is DeMar DeRozan and he goes through [expletive] like everybody else.
“I think that was big for him. It took a lot of guts and a lot of heart to do that, and it’s something that helped me in my personal life — feeling comfortable about some of those things — and it opened my eyes to things I was ignorant about. And I think it was special for him to do that.”
Final Thoughts
Despite being one of the top players in the NBA, DeMar DeRozan is making it a priority to be vocal about his mental health every chance he gets because he knows it’s important as it can encourage others to start taking their mental health seriously.
So, are you going to take his advice?