Derrick Rose: The Injury, Recovery, and Return of a Chicago Bulls Superstar

By Chicago Tribune Staff

Derrick Rose is a collection of articles, interviews, and features that originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune, as written by the award-winning journalists who followed the Chicago Bulls superstar's yearlong saga of injury and recovery, and his short-lived return for the 2013–2014 season.

Chicago's vibrant and discursive sports culture has perhaps never been more fully on display than during Derrick Rose's lost season. Following his gut-wrenching knee injury in the 2012 playoffs, Rose began the Bulls' 20122013 campaign recovering and rehabilitating, and neither team nor player definitively declared a date for his return.

As rumors swirled of Rose's estimated return to a scrappy Bulls team, local fans became increasingly frustrated. Debate raged over talk radio and the blogosphere, misinformation would spread like wildfire, snappy soundbites became amplified like city air raid sirens, and grainy video clips of Rose practicing would be pored over with investigative scrutiny.

This book takes readers on the 20122013 season's roller-coaster ride of speculation and hope, and concludes with the initial optimism surrounding Rose's 2013 preseason promise and the eventual devastation of his second season-ending injury. Derrick Rose is the full story of Chicago's homegrown superstar as only the Chicago Tribune could tell it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Agate Digital
• Release date: Dec 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781572844704

Chicago Tribune Staff

The Chicago Tribune, founded in 1847, is the flagship newspaper of the Chicago Tribune Media Group.

Book preview

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including copying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission from the publisher.

Chicago Tribune

Tony W. Hunter, Publisher

Gerould W. Kern, Editor

R. Bruce Dold, Editorial Page Editor

Bill Adee, Vice President/Digital

Jane Hirt, Managing Editor

Joycelyn Winnecke, Associate Editor

Peter Kendall, Deputy Managing Editor

Ebook edition 1.0 November 2013

ISBN-13 978-1-57284-470-4

Agate Digital is an imprint of Agate Publishing. Agate books are available in bulk at discount prices. For more information visit agatepublishing.com.

Contents

About This Book

Introduction

Part 1: Chicago’s MVP

Part 2: Injury and the 2012 Offseason

Part 3: The 2012-13 Season

Part 4: The 2013 Playoffs

Epilogue: Looking Forward

Sources

About This Book

This book was created using articles published in the Chicago Tribune. The material has been carefully selected from the Tribune’s rich archive of material on Derrick Rose and edited to present the story of the Bulls point guard and his year on the sidelines.

Throughout the book, regular text denotes original material taken from the Tribune’s archives. Italic text denotes new material that has been added to provide context for the source material.

Introduction

In the 2012 NBA playoffs, the Chicago Bulls hosted the Philadelphia 76ers in the first round. The heavily favored Bulls built up a solid lead in the first game of the series, but the Sixers were closing the gap at the end of the fourth quarter. With 82 seconds left, a jump-stop gone wrong brought 2010-11 league MVP Derrick Rose’s career to a screeching halt for the next year, and, as Sports Columnist David Haugh wrote, became the defining moment of the season.

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Rose being helped off the court by Chicago Bulls trainers Fred Tedeschi, left, and Jeff Tanaka, after he was injured late in the first game of the Eastern Conference quarterfinals against the Philadelphia 76ers Apr. 28, 2012.

As Rose lay grimacing in pain on the United Center floor for several excruciating minutes, the fans in the crowd of 21,943 who weren’t hyperventilating shouted encouragement.

M-V-P! M-V-P! the chants rang.

The louder the chorus echoed, the more Chicago’s most valuable patient seemed to grimace, as if he knew what everybody feared: This was bad. Very bad.

Less than 20 feet away, Reggie Rose looked on helplessly from his courtside seat. As his little brother grabbed his knee, a city crossed its fingers. Trainers assisted a limping Rose off the court on the way to Rush University Medical Center for tests that later determined the sick feeling will last awhile locally.

There’s no doubt when Rose tore his ACL after planting in the lane late in the fourth quarter of a 103-91 playoff victory over the Sixers, the Bulls’ championship hopes buckled. There’s also little doubt in my mind Rose’s season-ending injury occurred because of bad luck, not bad judgment by Tom Thibodeau.

It happens to the best of players. Rose instinctively reached for his knee in midair and when he landed, his body language screamed something between Ow! and Uh-oh. Teammates in a locker room full of soft tones and somber expressions braced for the worst-case scenario confirmed at 5:24 p.m. in a Bulls news release.

Tough to see one of your brothers down like that, Rip Hamilton said.

It means no more playoff games or Olympic Games for Rose, who now hopes to be ready for next season’s opener [in fall 2012]. It means baseball likely will regain the city’s focus sooner than the Sox or Cubs deserve. It means the Bulls still can oust the Sixers without Rose — and perhaps even the winner of the Celtics-Hawks series in the second round — but they cannot beat the Heat without him.

Which brings us to the only point anybody cares about in a game in which Hamilton was more efficient than a hybrid car in scoring 19 points on seven shots: Why was Rose playing so late with the Bulls’ lead so comfortable?

If beating the Heat to win the Eastern Conference is the only thing that matters, why did Thibodeau have Rose still in during mop-up time of Game 1 in the first round? Even Sixers forward Thaddeus Young wondered, speaking for basketball skeptics everywhere.

You definitely don’t want to see him go down in a game where he kind of should have been out, Young said.

The question in the postgame news conference irked Thibodeau. The defensiveness of his answer will infuriate many Bulls fans, but I agree with what Thibodeau said — if not the way he said it.

I don’t work backward like you guys do, Thibodeau snapped. The score was going the other way. He’s got to play. We sat him till the (7:53) mark of the fourth quarter. He’s got to work on closing. That’s what I was thinking.

Rose needs to work on closing sounds as silly as Thibodeau needing to practice on his intensity. But Thibodeau had nothing to apologize for regarding Rose playing. You didn’t have to be the best coach in the NBA the last two seasons to understand why Rose was on the floor.

This wasn’t a meaningless regular-season game. This was the NBA playoffs. Momentum matters. Sixers coach Doug Collins sought any glimmer of hope in the final minutes to make Game 2 less daunting psychologically for his team. Thibodeau wanted to do everything to prevent that momentum from developing.

On the possession on which Rose injured his knee, the Bulls led 99-87 with 82 seconds left. The pesky Sixers had outscored the Bulls by eight points over the previous three minutes, making the Bulls’ closing statement less emphatic than Thibodeau wanted. So the reigning NBA coach of the year followed instincts that have served him well and let a player who missed 27 games get work he needed despite a double-digit margin.

It backfired horribly, created the worst imaginable image for the Bulls and made Thibodeau a target. But understand Rose injured his sixth body part this season. Rose didn’t tweak an old injury that would have benefited from more rest or caution. He ruptured a ligament upon liftoff like he could have at any point in the first quarter or Game 7 of the NBA Finals.

Making the Finals was supposed to provide the defining moment of the 2011-12 season for Rose and the Bulls. Instead it came in the first game of the first playoff round and was memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Part 1: Chicago’s MVP

May 2011

Before his injury, Rose demonstrated he was one of the best players in the game. He not only won the NBA’s top award for an individual player during the 2010-11 season, he did so playing for his hometown team.

When Rose rhetorically asked aloud last fall [2010] why couldn’t he win the NBA most valuable player award, the rare boldness took Simeon coach Robert Smith back to one March day in 2007.

Walking over to Carver Arena in Peoria before Simeon’s Class AA state boys basketball championship victory, Rose made a proclamation that Smith believes best illustrated how hot the competitive fire burns beneath Rose’s icy-cool exterior.

Derrick said, ‘I’m about to show everybody I’m the best point guard in the country,’ Smith recalled in his office with a smile. I looked at my coaches and we were like, oh, man, he’s going to be shooting, shooting, trying to prove something.

Then Rose proved all he cared about was winning in the most memorable two-point effort in IHSA history.

He only took (seven) shots but was showing everyone he was a true point guard with (eight) assists, Smith said. After the game I said, ‘Was that what you meant?’ He was like, ‘Yeah. Even though I didn’t score, I was the best player on the floor.’ He took a lot of pride in that.

Chicago never has been prouder of Rose, the only player besides Wilt Chamberlain to win the NBA’s MVP in his hometown. Somehow it enhances the honor when The City That Works can celebrate someone with a work ethic as rare as his athleticism.

The league presented Rose the trophy at a comfy hotel in the northern suburbs, but it might have been more fitting to hold the ceremony at Murray Park on the South Side. No matter what the map says, Rose and his buddies grew up feeling a lot farther from NBA life than 1901 W. Madison 10 miles away.

It’s special that a little kid from Englewood won MVP, Rose said. That’s something I never thought about when I was younger. Nobody would have thought it. But anything can happen.

For an athlete destined to be in the city’s sports echelon with Jordan and Payton and Banks before his career ends, anything did.

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Rose, with Simeon Career Academy teammates Tim Flowers, left, and Kevin Johnson.

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Rose led Simeon to consecutive Class AA state basketball championships in 2006 and 2007.

At the corner of 73rd and Wood, youths not much younger than Rose spent part of a chilly Tuesday afternoon imitating his crossover dribble and mimicking the tear-drop jumper he learned on the same asphalt court avoiding trouble. Everybody around here knows this was the spot where the basketball skills of Rose first bloomed. This is where people began determining a long time ago that Rose was an even more