Derrick Rose Is as Good as Ever, Just Not Yet Consistently

There’s a lot of talk about Derrick Rose going around. The Chicago Bulls’ star point guard has put up some sloppy box scores lately, and the basketball-watching world has noticed.

Bulls fans should rest easy about Rose’s numbers, though—sometimes they lie. A line like 13-of-33 shooting, to go with 11 turnovers and just one assist (Rose’s numbers from a 113-111 overtime victory on the road against the vaunted Golden State Warriors on Jan. 27) certainly isn’t encouraging to the naked eye.

But, luckily for us, our eyes aren’t naked. We’re capable of understanding Rose’s court presence on a more metaphysical level and of putting his play into the greater context of his career.

The league MVP in 2011, Rose subsequently underwent two major knee surgeries in a 20-month period. As one of the game’s highest-usage players, then and now, jumping back into such a huge role after that kind of bodily trauma isn’t a common NBA occurrence by any means. Tracy McGrady, Grant Hill and Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway went through some similar trials, but none of them played quite like Rose does.

Derrick uses torque and reckless bursts of athleticism like perhaps no one before him—the closest comparison is the more diminutive Allen Iverson. In watching Rose’s return, we should be concerned more with his process than his results. If Rose is still able to fly around the court and create opportunities for himself and his team by breaking down defenses—as he has for most of the season, and particularly in recent days—then we should be smiling.

Christian Petersen/Getty Images

The finer points will come in time. B/R's Dan Favale shows how they're already coming, in this analysis of Rose's steadily morphing jump shot. Rose’s body and brain are still on the mend, and he doesn’t yet consistently have the touch near the rim that he used to. His mental endurance visibly wanes at times, too—that’s what all those turnovers are about, as well as his occasionally poor shot selection.

	2010-11	January, 2015
Points per game	25.0	20.3
Assists per game	7.7	4.9
Field goal percentage	44.3	39.2
Three-point percentage	33.2	34.4
Turnovers per game	3.4	3.4

But a confident, improving Rose is terrific news for Chicago, even with his efficiency often sagging. Rose showed against Golden State that even with a bad box score, he can change games just by virtue of his speed and gravitas. He made the Warriors—owners of the third-most-efficient defense in the NBA—exhausted chasing him around. And he did hit the game-winner, after all:

Rose also rose to the occasion defensively, holding MVP front-runner Stephen Curry to one of his worst offensive performances of the year with 9-of-23 shooting.

"Missing two years, coming out competing, if anyone was to see me play, my goal is to make it look like I haven't missed any years or missed a game," Rose recently said to K.C. Johnson of the Chicago Tribune. "I've got to continue to work and continue to put every game behind me.’'

Rose certainly doesn’t look that way yet—it’s clear he’s missed some time. His game is spotty and erratic, but it’s also starting to approach the sorts of thrills his coming-out party gave us four crazy years ago. Gross as his numbers were against the Warriors, there was no mistaking the impact his bravado had on the game's shocking result.

A numerical look at Rose’s game in 2015 is inherently flawed—there’s no need to read a box score like it’s braille. The Bulls’ home-town point guard is still a physical force, just not a finely tuned one. Defenses are still forced to game-plan around him and account for his lightning movement with tiring forms of transition and help defense.

Will Rose be able to master the many dimensions of his job in time for the playoffs? That’s anyone’s guess. But he’s still got the body and mind to become one of the most destructive players around again. It’s just a matter of when he puts it all together.