There is no denying the fact that Derrick Rose is one of the best players in the NBA when he is healthy.  He has an MVP trophy on his mantle in the era of Lebron James that proves it.  Debates rage all the time over whether DRose or Chris Paul is the best point guard in the NBA and it was definitely DRose during his MVP season.  CP3 doesn’t have an MVP.  Deron Williams was in the conversation for a few seasons but after being such a pain in the ass that he forced long time Utah Jazz coach Jerry Sloan to retire it has all been downhill for Deron.  He ran himself out of Utah and has struggled/stopped caring even since being dealt to the New Jersey/Brooklyn Nets.  In the 2012 NBA Playoffs, Derrick Rose tore his left ACL against the Philadelphia 76ers:

The Bulls went on to lose that playoffs series against the 76ers in a rare 8 seed upset of a 1 seed as they couldn’t recover from the sting of losing their leader to such a gruesome injury.  The Bulls entered the 2013 NBA season knowing that DRose was going to be out at least for the majority of the regular season.  They fought, scratched and clawed their way to being a respectable team.  Much more so than the team that got beat by the 76ers in the playoffs immediately following Derrick’s injury.  Chris Paul in the meantime was leading Lob City and creating a massive amount of highlights turning the Los Angeles Clippers into a winning team and even better than the Lakers!  This cemented CP3 into the title of best PG in the NBA without a question.  As the regular season started winding down, DRose got MEDICALLY CLEARED to return to playing basketball.  He started practicing with the team.  Eventually, he was dominating in practice.  However, DRose didn’t play in games.  He told the media that he wasn’t 100% and that he couldn’t dunk yet using his left knee to launch or plant for the dunk.  Whispers started coming into the newspaper and onto sports radio in Chicago that his teammates were getting upset that Derrick Rose was looking great in practice but then refusing to play in actual games.  The team was an injured mess by the end of the season.  Deng, Hinrich, Noah and others were The Walking Dead but still out there doing what they could do to play and try to help the team.  Fans started joining the select media members in starting to question whether DRose had gone soft.  Derrick’s brother started running his mouth and questioning the credentials of the doctors that medically cleared his brother.  Adidas started running commercials for “The Return” and it never happened.  DRose sat out the entire season because he listened to his brother and the people in his inner circle instead of listening to the doctors.  Now I’m not saying that Derrick and his posse are stupid but the guy did have to cheat on his SATs to get admitted into Memphis to play college ball for a season.  Not Harvard.  Not Duke.  Not Notre Dame.  Not Stanford.  Not Yale.  MEMPHIS.  John Calipari took another hit to his credibility and Memphis had to forfeit a Final Four appearance because Derrick Rose wasn’t book smart enough to have the grades or the test scores to qualify for Memphis.  So I’m going to trust medically trained doctors that deal with thousands of people that tear their ACLs on what the timetables, procedures and next steps are to rehabbing from a torn ACL more than I am going to trust a group of people that aren’t even intelligent enough to qualify for admittance to Memphis University.

SIDEBAR:  When I was Vice President of IWA Mid-South Wrestling, I saw way too many injuries to the guys and girls that wrestled on our shows.  I saw dislocated jaws, dislocated shoulders, broken collarbones, torn ACLs, broken ankles, countless concussions, countless wounds requiring stitches and 3 guys almost bleed to death (2 from severe head trauma and one from almost having his arm cut off when impaled with a light tube.)  They all got right back in the ring after being medically cleared and about 95% of them BEFORE they were medically cleared.  The one injury that made my stomach the most queasy and was the most brutal to see involved a female.  Mickie Knuckles jumped from a stage to the floor during a match with Sara Del Rey and it snapped her femur in half.  Her leg folded over and looked like a profile of a chair.  I want to throw up just typing about it.  She had to have a steel rod inserted to reconnect the two parts of the femur.  The first surgery didn’t work properly so she had to have it redone and go through a second surgery.  She made it back into a ring in a shorter amount of time than it took Derrick Rose to come back and play in an NBA game.  The point of this sidebar is to say that I have been around dozens of athletes recovering from similar or worse injuries than DRose.  I saw the fear.  I saw the uncertainty.  I saw the process.  I saw athletes doing what doctors told them and that is basically get back out there once you are healed and work through the mental issues with coming back.  Fear you are going to reinjure yourself.  Fear that you are going to hurt something else trying to overcompensate for your injury.  I’m not saying that DRose is soft.  I’m not saying that he is a coward.  I’m saying that he didn’t follow the timeline.  He didn’t follow the procedures.  He didn’t work through the mental issues with coming back once you are medically cleared to do so.  I don’t know what the reason was for the decision but I am saying that it is FAIR for people to question his mental toughness and whether or not he is SAWFT with the way that his return was handled.  Sidebar over.

So Derrick Rose waits until the 2013-14 NBA season to make his return to the Bulls.  The season starts and he is lousy.  He has all the rust from missing over a year from live regular season game action.  He is obviously a little tentative.  His shot is horrible.  In 11 games played, he was only over 40% shooting from the floor in 3 games when he was a 46% shooter over his career.  This season, he was at 35% and that was skewed by the fact that 2 of the 3 > 40% games where in the last 3 games he played before getting hurt.  This was all stuff that he would have gotten out of his system if he had come back at the end of last season and he would have been ready to go and at 100% for the start of this season.  It doesn’t matter though because on November 22 against the Portland Trail Blazers, this happened:

In the midst of the Chicago Bulls blowing a 21 point lead against the Blazers, DRose tore his meniscus in the right knee.  So it is an injury to his other knee.  Fluke injury.  It could have happened even if he came back last season and got the rust off before this season.  It sucks for Derrick but I won’t shed any tears for him.  He has tens of millions of dollars in the bank.  He should be able to survive even if he never plays another second of NBA basketball.  He has a $250M deal with Adidas.  No tears.  But I also won’t shed a tear because there is a bit of karma here.  He babied himself.  He didn’t listen to the doctors.  He played it safe.  He still got hurt.  I’ve heard a timetable of 3-4 months on returning from injuries like this BUT after the way his return was handled last time, it might be November of 2014 before anyone sees him play in an NBA game that counts.  Let the SAWFT talk start again because you know it is coming…and he only has his brother and advisors to blame.