Per Anthony Chiang and Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald, the Miami Heat and star free agent DeMar DeRozan have mutual interest in each other.
“The Heat has expressed interest in Bulls free agent guard DeMar DeRozan, and DeRozan also has interest in Miami, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation,” Jackson and Chiang wrote. “The Heat is among several teams in play for the six-time All Star.”
DeRozan stands out as one of the more talented free agents left on the market. The 34-year-old has been one of the better scorers in the NBA for more than a decade now.
He has averaged 20-plus points per game in each of his last 11 seasons, with the streak extending all the way back to the 2013-14 campaign, when DeRozan was still a member of the Toronto Raptors organization.
DeRozan has also scored the sixth-most points of any NBA player since the 2009-10 season with a whopping 23,582 to his name during that span. The only five players ahead of him are some of the best players of this generation in LeBron James, James Harden, Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and Stephen Curry.
The former University of Southern California standout was his usual dominant self from a scoring standpoint for a mediocre Chicago Bulls team during the 2023-24 regular season. Across 79 appearances, he averaged 24.0 points per game while shooting 48.0 percent from the floor, 33.3 percent from 3-point range and 85.3 percent from the charity stripe.
Now shifting gears to the Heat, they could seemingly use an offensive player of DeRozan’s caliber to take some scoring pressure off of the likes of Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo. Miami’s lack of offensive firepower outside of its stars became glaringly apparent in the Heat’s matchup against the Boston Celtics in the first round of the 2024 NBA Playoffs.
Butler sat out the entirety of the series with an MCL injury, and without arguably the Heat’s best offensive player, Miami scored under 100 points in four out of the five contests, with the one exception coming in Game 2.
If the Heat were to somehow find a way to acquire DeRozan this offseason, a trio of him, Butler and Adebayo would arguably stack up with any threesome in the Eastern Conference.