Imagining Derrick Rose's NBA Career If He Never Got Injured
Former Chicago Bulls and New York Knicks point guard Derrick Rose is retiring from the NBA.
This comes after a 16-year career in which he averaged 17.4 points and 5.2 assists. He won an MVP in 2011, which made him the youngest player in league history to secure that honor.
But even after what could easily be described as a successful run, career retrospectives on Rose will probably all start with some variation of: What if?
The torn ACL he suffered in 2012 derailed his time in the NBA, at least for a while. As a No. 1 overall pick, he took the league by storm during his first four seasons, but he never won a title, and his post-injury numbers look a lot different than those early years.
Here, we're going to tackle the question above. What if that devastating injury never happened? How much different would his career look? How much different would the league look?
Answers to all of that and more can be found below.
A Different Timeline for the Bulls
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A big reason Rose won the 2010-11 MVP was the vitriol that followed LeBron James to the Miami Heat. He had a stout case to win the award (more on that later), but there's no avoiding that LeBron's move was a factor.
The honor also had plenty to do with the general strength of Rose's Bulls.
Chicago went 62-20, the best record in the NBA. The team led the league in points allowed per 100 possessions. And it had one of the league's best core four players in Rose, Carlos Boozer, Luol Deng and Joakim Noah, three of whom were under 26 years old (with Boozer being the outlier at 29).
When Rose held up the MVP trophy in 2011, it seemed like Chicago would be at or near the top of the title contenders' tier for the foreseeable future.
However, injuries limited him to 39 games the following season. In the postseason, the infamous knee injury happened.
Suddenly, the Bulls were without their offensive engine and best player for all of 2012-13 and much of the three years after that.
From the start of 2011-12 to Rose's departure for the Knicks, they were still seventh in the NBA in winning percentage, but it was much harder to buy them as a bona fide contender. Had Rose's slashing, playmaking and finishing ability consistently been a part of that run, Chicago may well have won a title. The team was at the top of the East prior to the 2011 playoffs.
Instead of pulling that off, the Bulls have been toiling through mediocrity for most of the last decade and change.
More Accolades
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Rose winning an MVP at 22 years old almost felt like a guarantee that more trophies were coming.
NBA development typically isn't anywhere near its end point at that age, and there were obvious areas of improvement for him back then.
If Rose didn't have his time (for years) consumed by recovery from various injuries, he could have focused more on his game. His three-point percentage might have ticked up. His individual defense may have become more consistent.
And the trajectory of a 22-year-old MVP almost certainly would have led to, at the very least, more All-NBA and All-Star nods.
In reality, Rose finished his career with one All-NBA selection and three All-Star appearances.
A Different Eastern Conference
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From 2011 through 2018, LeBron James went to eight straight Eastern Conference Finals with the Heat and Cleveland Cavaliers.
Throughout that span, there were various challengers, including the 2011 Bulls, Paul George's Indiana Pacers teams and the younger version of the Jayson Tatum-Jaylen Brown Boston Celtics, but LeBron winding up on the game's biggest stage almost felt like a foregone conclusion.
Had Rose and his core teammates stayed healthy and developed together, that almost certainly wouldn't have been the case.
That Bulls team was stacked, particularly on the defensive end. And with more chances to knock LeBron out before the Finals, there's a good chance they would have pulled it off at least once.
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A Different Spot on the All-time Ladder
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Wins over replacement player (value over replacement player times 2.7) is a cumulative stat (think points, rather than points per game) that endeavors to put all of a player's box-score contributions into a single number.
Rose had 28.6 through his age-22 campaign, when he won the MVP. Only 15 players had more through that age, most of which are either in the Hall of Fame or will be soon.
His per-game averages through those years were 20.9 points, 6.7 assists and 3.9 rebounds. If we round those down to 20, six and three (to account for late-career decline), only 16 players in league history matched or exceeded all three of those marks for their careers.
With how his time in the NBA panned out, Rose isn't likely to find his way into many top-50-of-all-time conversations. Top 100 is probably out of reach, too.
Again, though, if he'd stayed on that rocket-like trajectory he was on in his early 20s, that wouldn't be the case. Had he won a title at some point, that would bump up those lists even more.
Hall of Fame?
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Right now, Rose's Hall of Fame Probability (a model from Basketball Reference that projects how likely a player is to get in) is at 10.5 percent, just inside the top 200 on that list.
If you add the hypotheticals from each of the last two slides (more accolades and better individual numbers), that number would absolutely be higher.
As it stands, he's probably not getting in. When he becomes eligible, he'll likely be the first MVP in NBA history to fail to receive that honor.
That can be chalked up, almost entirely, to the unfortunate series of injuries that rocked his career in the early 2010s.
Would Rose Still Be Playing?
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Rose turns 36 in October. In today's NBA, it's not unusual for a star to last beyond that age, especially one with an MVP and other accolades on his resume.
Given the explosive way he played and his relatively slight frame, there's a good chance that small, nagging injuries would have caught up to him at some point, but the catastrophic one obviously sped that up.
He still got the sort of late-career, veteran-leader years that many stars do, but they might have come later without the injuries. They may have come with a little more on-court impact.
And a few might even have happened beyond 2023-24.
Rose Never Joins the 'What-If?' Club
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Thanks to the devastating injury Rose suffered in 2012, and the wave of others that came afterward, he's another member of the NBA's "what if" club.
He joins players such as Bill Walton, Brandon Roy, Anfernee Hardaway, Grant Hill, Tracy McGrady and several others.
It's probably unfair to describe Rose's or any other above story as "sad." All got the chance to reach a higher level in their jobs and with their crafts than most around the world do in theirs.
But it's impossible to look at those careers, obviously including Rose's, without wondering what might have been.
There's almost a certain kind of honor to be mentioned among those names. All of the above could accurately be described as NBA legends. But no one could fault the players themselves for preferring the alternate timeline over that honor.
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