Last August, as DeMar DeRozan was on his way out of San Antonio, rumors swirled that he would be willing to take a pay cut to go home and play for the Los Angeles Lakers or join his former Toronto Raptors teammate Kyle Lowry on the Miami Heat. Instead, the Chicago Bulls sent Thaddeus Young, Al-Farouq Aminu and three draft picks (including a first-rounder) to the Spurs in exchange for the now-32-year-old DeRozan, who was signed to a three-year, $85 million pact as part of the transaction. 

The deal was met with immediate criticism in some circles, and a poll of league scouts and executives conducted by ESPN’s Tim Bontemps identified it as one of the worst moves of the offseason. “Giving up another first-rounder to overpay [DeRozan] was the worst over-the-top move to get behind,” one exec told Bontemps. “I like the fit on the court,” a scout said. “But they’d better win, because if you don’t, you’re an expensive, bad team that can’t rebuild.”

Nearly halfway through the season, the Bulls are indeed winning. With DeRozan’s fellow newcomers Lonzo Ball and Alex Caruso joining a strong returning cast, their 25-10 record is best in the Eastern Conference and fourth-best in the NBA. DeRozan, meanwhile, is not only fitting in, but putting together the best season of his career.

That’s not an exaggeration. In 35.3 minutes a night, DeRozan is pouring in 26.9 points per game while also averaging 5.0 rebounds and 4.5 assists. He’s shooting 49.4 percent from the field, 36.2 percent from three and 85.8 percent from the line. And for the first time since his third year in the NBA, DeRozan’s team has a better pace-adjusted scoring margin with him in the game than on the bench — by an enormous margin.

Based on his box-score performance and on-off differentials, DeRozan has been worth 3.3 points per 100 possessions to the Bulls’ scoring margin so far this season, according to FiveThirtyEight’s overall RAPTOR metric. That’s the single-best mark of his 13-year career. Needless to say, it’s highly unusual for a player to deliver his best season this deep into his career. In our database of 3,527 players to appear in the NBA since the 1976-77 merger, just five have had their peak RAPTOR season later in their career than DeRozan – a list that includes Lowry, whose peak RAPTOR rating is also this season.

While this might be his best season, DeRozan has been showing improvement for a while now. And that improvement started — like most things with DeRozan do — in the midrange.

For much of his career, DeRozan was derided as an inefficient volume scorer. And for years, the criticism rang true. Through his first 10 seasons in the NBA, DeRozan finished with a true shooting percentage better than the league average only twice. Even while he was making All-Star appearances with the Raptors, DeRozan was getting there more on quantity than quality. He became something of a poster child for analytically minded thinkers in and around the league, who consistently noted the inefficiencies of his midrange-heavy shot profile.

A few years back, though, DeRozan made a tweak, and he became a more efficient player because of it. Instead of trading long twos for threes, like so many other efficiency-seeking scorers have in the past, DeRozan simply swapped out long twos for … slightly shorter twos.

In his first All-Star campaign (2013-14), a plurality of DeRozan’s shots were attempted between 16 and 23 feet from the basket — the least efficient area of the floor. Shots from that zone are not converted at a much higher rate than those outside the 3-point line, yet they are worth 1 fewer point. Coaches generally discourage those shots these days, and with good reason.

DeRozan, like many before him, has slashed his diet of those shots. These days, they account for around a quarter of his field-goal attempts — and that’s actually on the high side for him over the past few seasons. Instead of those deep twos, DeRozan has become an expert at both seeking and knocking down shots in the short midrange area. Where shots taken between 10 and 16 feet from the rim once accounted for around 18 percent of his total, they now make up 30 percent. These days, that’s his most common shot location.