Derrick Rose is making me look dumb over here. Really dumb. He was supposed to be washed up this season, an old guy on the decline, the perfect player for the DownToBuck highlights channel. Last season, when he made his late-season arrival in Minnesota, he looked okay at times, but once you looked past his All-Star seasons and his MVP, he was just a role-player. There was no reason to think that he would ever play at a higher than role-player level ever again.
Now I’m sitting here wondering how many twenty-point games he has before I re-remove him from my channel. Do I tough it out this season and then see if he REALLY declines next season? Do I bet on the fact that this resurgence will last for exactly one season? Or do I excise him like a tumor and wait until he turns 35 before putting him back on? I might be sounding frivolous right now but these are honestly the types of questions that keep me up at night.
Rose showed out in front of an arena full of Bulls fans who still love him, to the tune of 24 points and 8 assists. As he’s been doing all season, his drives to the basket were reminiscent of his Bulls days, pre-kneepocalypse. It would have been a better story to score fifty and hit a game-winner, but then again, the narrative here doesn’t need much embellishment to be compelling.