Derrick Rose was well on his way to becoming one of the best players in the NBA in the past 20 years or so but injuries were just ruthless with him, affecting his career when he started to take flight in the association. After becoming the youngest MVP in league history, the player suffered a couple of big injuries that prevented him from blossoming into the star he was expected to become.
His Chicago Bulls were also a very good team and they were expected to become the biggest challengers for LeBron James and his Miami Heat before the Indiana Pacers appeared to test the Floridians in the Eastern Conference. If it wasn’t for those injuries, people believed things would have been completely different for Rose and his team and even Luol Deng recently claimed that should Rose stayed healthy, the Bulls would have won the NBA championship.
“If the injury didn’t take place, we were on our way (to a championship),” Deng told NBC Sports Chicago‘s K.C. Johnson on the latest episode of the Bulls Talk Podcast. “If you look at every team and every organization that wins it, it takes a while for you guys to get there and then you break that ice. And I think with Thibs (head coach Tom Thibodeau), he had the right personnel and the right players that year.”
The 2011/12 season saw the Bulls as one of the favorites to put some pressure on the Miami Heat but things didn’t go their way. Rose tore his left ACL in the first round of the playoffs against the Philadelphia 76ers and that was the beginning of the end for a team that seemed to be ready to shock the world and bring the Bulls back to the headlines like Michael Jordan did in the 90s.
“I think when the injury happened — I’m not trying to be here and bash everyone — but I think we moved too fast away from the whole process and kind of just let a lot of guys go,” Deng said on the podcast. “A lot of guys that — not necessarily myself, Joakim (Noah), Derrick or anyone else you can think of, I’m talking about a lot of the ‘Bench Mob’ for example, they should have stayed there. And I think it hurt us when we started seeing everybody leaving.
“And it really challenged us to rebound, but even with Thibs, I think it hurt Thibs a lot where he couldn’t find individuals to fit the system that he’s trying to do.”
Derrick missed the next campaign and in 2013/14, he suffered a torn right meniscus after only 10 games. Rose became one of the biggest “what-ifs” in NBA history thanks to these things that affected him early in his career. He was just 23 when he won his MVP award and things looked incredibly bright for him. However, things don’t go as we want sometimes and Rose is the perfect sample of that.
Right now he plays for the New York Knicks, trying to lead a young team to compete in the East. He’s still missing that ring and NBA fans really want him to get his hands on the Larry O’Brien trophy. Hopefully, he can do it soon and win lift a trophy that, according to Deng, should have been his in 2012.
