Just a teenager at the time, DeMar DeRozan was in his usual seat for yet another local Lakers broadcast during the 2005-06 season. Perched up on his bed in his childhood Compton, California home on a Sunday afternoon, he settled in to once again study his favorite player, Kobe Bryant, take on the Toronto Raptors in a largely unanticipated January matchup. The game was off to a sleepy start.
"It was kind of dead in there, and it wasn't jumping like it normally was," DeRozan said.
DeRozan had, like Bryant, just moved on from his own mini-fro hairstyle a few years prior, constantly patterning both his look and his game after the Laker phenom.