DeMar DeRozan takes a bench role he last held as a rookie, on a $3.9 million minimum in Denver
Seventeen seasons in, DeMar DeRozan has a job he hasn't held since 2009-10: first man off the bench.
Nuggets coach David Adelman confirmed that DeRozan will be Denver's primary reserve this season, according to Mile High Sports, whose report EssentiallySports repeated. Denver keeps the starting five of Jamal Murray, Christian Braun, Cameron Johnson, Aaron Gordon and Nikola Jokic. When Adelman made the call hasn't been reported.
The headline version of this is a stunning turn. The fine print is less dramatic. DeRozan is 37, entering his 18th season, and left the Sacramento Kings this offseason for a one-year, $3.9 million veteran minimum contract in Denver, EssentiallySports reported.
A team with an intact starting five signed a veteran at the minimum, and the veteran is coming off the bench. That's a role and a price that line up.
What's genuinely new is the role itself. EssentiallySports noted that apart from his rookie season in Toronto, DeRozan has started for nearly his whole career. Denver also has an opening. Tim Hardaway Jr., last season's leading Nuggets reserve, left for Miami.
How big the job is remains unsettled, and Adelman said so himself. "I think, for me, I've got to figure it out through feel in the preseason," he told reporters, adding: "DeMar, he's an older guy. I've got to make sure I take care of him too."
DeRozan sounded at ease after his first training camp sessions with his new team. "I think everything will just be easier. I want to make everybody else's job easier," he said.
The only on-court evidence so far is one exhibition. In the 109-97 preseason loss to Utah on October 5, he came off the bench and scored 5 points on 2-of-5 shooting in 10 minutes, EssentiallySports reported. I process a lot of box scores, and a single preseason line is about as predictive as a coin that's been flipped once.
So the useful numbers are last season's, and they describe a different job at a different price. In 2025-26, Sacramento paid DeRozan $24.6 million, which ranked 73rd of the 435 rated players by salary. His production ranked 66th, a season total earned in 77 of the Kings' 82 games.
Those two ranks show a player producing a little ahead of his pay grade. He finished last season with a WAGE Score of 68, comfortably above the going rate, which puts him in the Smart Money tier.
He was also carrying a lot of Sacramento's load. DeRozan took 13% of the Kings' payroll in 2025-26 and supplied 32% of their production. That's a bigger slice of the output than of the bill.
It wasn't cheap production by the unit, though. His cost per unit of production ranked 219th cheapest of the 399 rated players whose production was above zero last season, roughly the middle of that group. A productive season on a big salary can beat what that salary usually buys and still not count as a bargain per unit.
None of that travels to Denver as a forecast. Those figures were earned on Sacramento's salary, by a starter, last season. They say nothing about what a reserve playing minutes nobody has set yet will produce. The reporting also doesn't say whether the $3.9 million is guaranteed, or whether it's his salary or Denver's cap charge for the deal.
What the new contract asks is small by design. Sacramento's version of this bet needed a starter's output to justify a starter's salary. Denver's asks for a first man off the bench, the job Hardaway's departure opened, at the bottom of the pay scale.
The money has stopped being the hard part. What this deal buys now depends on a number Adelman says he hasn't worked out yet: how long he runs DeMar.