DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry winning war for respect

The tank was on. Surrender was imminent.

New Toronto Raptors general manager Masai Ujiri had shed Andrea Bargnani's contract and found a taker for Rudy Gay. With the greatest Canadian basketball prospect ever as a potential prize with the No. 1 pick, the franchise seemed poised to continue to tear things down in order to rebuild properly on a new, home-grown foundation.

Part of that tear down would involve trading Kyle Lowry, who the team had acquired a year prior. The Raptors would have been the third team to decide Lowry wasn't their long-term point guard, whether due to talent, fit, attitude, or point on the development curve.

It would have left DeMar DeRozan, still just 24 then, in a curious position, still plenty young enough to build with but on a four-year, $38 million contract (plus incentives) and with an upside thought to be somewhere south of All-Star.

Ujiri opted not to ship out Lowry or tear things down, letting early signs of a successful chemistry accident grow. The 2013-14 Raptors were penicillin. The best season in franchise history was the result. DeRozan became the team's first All-Star since Chris Bosh, Lowry should have been there, too. DeRozan's performance triggered incentives giving him a raise, and the franchise committed to Lowry with a four-year, $48 million contract.

The extra lining in their pockets hasn't made Lowry and DeRozan complacent. As they enter the 2014-15 season with increased expectations, they realize they are the leaders. There's no struggle to be the Alpha, though, just as there wasn't when the two vouched for each other instead of themselves ahead of last season's All-Star selections.

"After that," DeRozan said in July of the team's heart-wrenching Game 7 loss to the Brooklyn Nets, a series best described as trench warfare. "I looked at Kyle as my friend, my brother outside of all of this basketball stuff ... The way I was looking at it was that I trust my dog. You trust your best friend."

They are dissimilar people but with similar chips on their shoulders. Lowry's oft-prickly demeanor is well-documented, but DeRozan, too, uses every slight as motivation. An All-Star selection? Cool, but Sports Illustrated ranked him just the 61st best player in the league, and he won't forget it. Everyone projecting you for a playoff spot for the first time in forever? Great, but Bradley Beal and John Wall think they're a better backcourt pairing, and, well, "We will see."

The battles that Lowry and DeRozan have fought individually to garner respect now bleed into the collective. Last year's team earned a reputation as fourth-quarter warriors, a team that wouldn't stay down no matter the odds. The franchise's marketing department has picked up on this element of the team's identity, too, leveraging the combattre, vaincre ou mourir attitude of the players and building it into #WeTheNorth othering that now adorns the team's home battlefield.

As complementary as their attitudes and leadership styles are off the court, DeRozan and Lowry also form a lethal duo on it. Few teams boast a pair of perimeter players so adept at creating their own offense, and DeRozan's emergence as a playmaker from the wing gives the team two able facilitators in the starting lineup.

Head coach Dwane Casey has expressed an intention to run more dual pick-and-roll sets this season, something not all teams have the personnel to take advantage of. Having a Lowry on one side of the floor and a DeRozan on the other spreads the defense out horizontally - having a pair of strong pick-and-roll bigs like Amir Johnson and Jonas Valanciunas helps, too - and either can collapse the defense with a few quick steps.

When Lowry and DeRozan took the floor together last season, the team scored 106.8 points per-100 possessions and outscored teams by 3.9 points per-100 possessions. From Dec. 8 onward (the date Gay was traded), those numbers rose to 109.2 and 5.7, respectively, elite marks league-wide.

The Raptors with Lowry and DeRozan on the floor together nearly matched the league's best offense, and the defense with both was slightly better than the league average. An added benefit to two players as offensively gifted as Lowry and DeRozan is the ability to stagger their playing time to prop up the second unit. Lowry, in particular, took on a heavier scoring load when DeRozan hit the bench, upping his per-minute scoring by 56 percent.

Analyzing them apart is worthwhile, but their paths to appreciation are inextricably linked, and it's their impact together that's dragging a moribund franchise back to respectability.