When LeBron James left Miami to return to the Cleveland Cavaliers two summers ago, the Heat responded by replacing him with Luol Deng. As you can imagine, it wasn’t the most celebrated free agent signing. Replacing one of the greatest athletes of all time with a ten-year veteran who plays the same position and is worse in nearly every aspect of basketball is rarely something to get excited about. 

That logic undercuts the value that Deng has actually provided in Miami the past two seasons. The vast majority of players who have ever played in the NBA are worse than LeBron James at just about all phases of basketball. What makes Deng special—what is finally being noticed in these playoffs—is that he is the rare veteran player whose game has grown perfectly in sync with the evolution of the NBA.

In his 12th season, with another summer of free agency approaching, Deng has emerged as a near prototype for the small ball power forward. You might even argue that if one of Deng’s previous coaches had been forward thinking enough to play him at power forward during the prime of his career, he might have had an impact not dissimilar to what Draymond Green is doing in Golden State. 

Obviously Deng can shoot, which opens things up for Miami’s offense and spreads the floor for the crafty drives of Dwyane Wade and Goran Dragic. He forces slower big men to come out to defend him at the wing, and he’s still fast enough to blow right by them. All of this helps the offense hum and gets the most out of Miami’s guards, but it’s also the simple part. If taking a guy over 6’6 who can shoot and putting him at power forward was all it took to succeed at small ball then a lot of teams might have been doing it a long time ago. 

Deng can play the role because of his defensive versatility. The number of post forwards in the NBA who Deng can’t reasonably defend with some success is a short list (no one on that list plays for the Toronto Raptors, by the way). He is long enough to make a post entry difficult. He’s strong enough to at least hold his own until a double team comes. More importantly, he can be an anchor for pick-and-roll defense. He can drop back and wait for a rolling big, or he can switch and defend guards. Toronto’s guards aren’t getting any easy looks because when a big sets a screen for them it often results with the long armed Deng defending them up at the perimeter, which is a nightmare for someone like Kyle Lowry who would prefer to come off a screen and make a quick move or shot. The result has sometimes been Lowery trying to take his defender one-on-one in order to avoid having to contend with Deng on the perimeter.

That’s the value of Deng in a nutshell: he can basically defend all five positions. An NBA team shouldn’t be able to get away with playing Udonis Haslem in a playoff game at this point of his career, but the Heat are able to avoid mismatches by making sure Deng defends the most problematic scorer. Even if the Heat aren’t playing small ball, he’s a perfectly good option to defend a leading scorer like DeMar DeRozan. 

Speaking of DeRozan, he will make considerably more money than Deng this summer. In fact, he’s still likely to receive a maximum contract despite a horrible playoff showing thus far. Youth is a pretty big factor in the discrepancy; Deng is 31 and DeRozan is 26.

That said, the way things have developed in the past few months, it looks like building around DeRozan would be a much more difficult proposition than getting value out of Deng. DeRozan cannot slide into the role of Deng. He’s an average defender when guarding someone his size, but he doesn’t have the lateral quickness to stay in front of scoring point guards or the strength to contend with post scorers. He might improve defensively over time, but he doesn’t have the size to be as versatile as Deng.

His value lies almost exclusively in his ability to score, and he’s had trouble doing so in the playoffs. It’s not that DeRozan doesn’t deserve a big contract. A team is unlikely to get through a regular season without a scorer who can get baskets without set plays. But a team’s ability to rely on a player like that once the playoffs start is increasingly difficult unless he’s transcendently good (like, say, Kobe Bryant). 

Both DeRozan and Deng have played 11 playoff games this year. DeRozan has scored 195 points on 218 shots. Deng has scored 168 points on 116 shots. That’s a drastic difference in efficiency. DeRozan has a much bigger burden to score than Deng, but numbers like that suggest he can’t shoulder that burden on his own.

Even if DeRozan bounces back with some strong games this postseason, he’s going to be a big money risk for the Raptors or whoever decides to invest in him.

Meanwhile, Deng will participate in another low-key signing somewhere. There are a handful of teams that will aggressively try to lure Kevin Durant to their franchise. Almost all of them will strike out. The smart ones will target Deng. Just like two years ago, that might feel like a disappointment. It would be misguided to categorize it as such. You can do a whole lot with Luol Deng.