Whose Return Is More Important: Derrick Rose or Kobe Bryant?
Kobe Bryant and Derrick Rose are back, preparing for 2014-15, their careers no longer on hold, their returns of comparable yet varying significance.
Droves of NBA superstars currently find themselves battling injuries, their seasons hampered—or ruined completely—by offseason and preseason trauma. The Kevin Durants, the Bradley Beals, the Paul Georges. For the first time in a long time, though, this melancholy manifest includes neither Bryant nor Rose. Their teams are, for the time being, spared from campaign-crushing absences.
And yet that's only one element—their health and availability—to these reunions. Though both Bryant and Rose are rejoining teams desperate for their services, the situations are different and the stakes diverse.
One of these reunions is more important than the other.
Kobe Bryant
If and when you tune in to watch the Los Angeles Lakers, it won't be out of hope that they can compete for a playoff spot or championship in the contender-crazed Western Conference. Or to watch Steve Nash—who Bleacher Report's Kevin Ding revealed has been ruled out for 2014-15—play one last time. Or because there's a recently added superstar free agent who promises a glimpse into the future.
You will watch because of Bryant. Other reasons exist—Julius Randle's development, Ed Davis actually receiving minutes, etc.—but none is more polarizing than Bryant's return and all it represents.
At 36, he is still the Lakers' lifeline. When healthy, he's their best player and only superstar, the lone stronghold standing between them and on-court irrelevancy.
"It's my job to go out there next season and lay it all out there on the line and get us to that elite level," he said in July, per ESPN.com.
Those words, now more than three months old, still apply to everything Lakers. They are authoritative and unambiguous, their intent rife with conviction.
Any other 18-year veteran coming off a season in which he made just six appearances wouldn't get away with delivering such lionhearted sentiments so casually, like his impending workload wasn't inappropriate or unrealistic.
That notion is, more than anything else, what Bryant is playing for in 2014-15. He's fighting against time, feuding with logic, trying to preserve and legitimize the blind faith everyone from his skeptics to his zealots admits exists in volume.
Never mind the title-or-bust mindset Bryant has parented for years. He has a two-year, $48.5 million extension to validate by, well, breaking and making history.
Head coach Byron Scott has set a minutes cap for Bryant that will limit him to "between 30 and 40 minutes" a night, according to the Los Angeles Daily News' Mark Medina. Scott also expects his future Hall of Famer to score "20-something" points per game, per Medina.
Only three players in league history—Michael Jordan (twice), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (three times), Karl Malone (four times)—have played in at least 50 games, logged 30-or-more minutes and averaged 20-plus points per game after their 36th birthday. Jordan was the only one to not appear in at least 79 games the season before his first scoring feat (2001-02), and that's because he willingly retired, not because he labored through two major injuries.
Expecting Bryant to match that brand of statistical output after missing 74 contests isn't realistic. Then again, that's the point, as USA Today's Adi Joseph alluded to:
"Kobe Bryant is angry. In his eyes, he has been disrespected by everyone around him. He seems almost healthy after missing all but six games last season. No one knows what to expect out of the Los Angeles Lakers shooting guard at 36. The Lakers have a weak roster, but Bryant won't go down quietly.
"
This season has almost nothing to do with the Lakers collectively. They aren't built to win now. Their roster is constructed for financial flexibility and the future additions that will (hopefully) allow them to move on from Bryant.
Here and now, they are about Bryant alone.
Everything that follows is for him, about him. It's his opportunity to not only justify his salary but silence his critics.
Can he adapt his game to account for physical constraints? Can he become more efficient? Can he prove that he is not the cause of the Lakers' downturn?
Is he done?
"If Father Time gets the best, he gets the best," Bryant told CBS Sports' Ken Berger. "But it's not for a lack of effort."
That effort—in all its idealized mystique—will be tested in 2014-15. And though his legacy cannot be wholly tainted or totaled by failure, he has never been more human than he is now. Staving off his mortality—a weakness as it pertains to Bryant—means everything.
Derrick Rose
Rose's return to the Chicago Bulls is different.
It holds all the same individual intrigue surrounding Bryant's return and then some, because for all Rose has already proved, his legacy is etched in sand.
In the event that flashes of preseason dominance prove transient and Rose is never the same—or close to the same—he won't be remembered for his 2010-11 MVP award or for having a fulfilling career. He'll be the center of "What could have been?" debates that, regardless of rendered verdicts, will only succeed in highlighting what never was.
Fifty will be a number that comes to define him. That's the number of appearances—playoffs and regular season—he's made since 2010-11.
Lofty dreams have been put on hold during that time. Rose is still the heir to Jordan's throne, an unenviable position that he's assumed with poise and polish. And up until 2012, the franchise weight he ferried wasn't deemed too heavy or far-fetched. The torch was his to have and to hold without a thought to the contrary.
There was no one better to succeed the greatest NBA player of all time. The Bulls languished in Jordan's shadow for so long, only making it past the first round of the playoffs once in the 10 years following his last go-round. In came Rose in 2008-09, a stoic rookie and Chicago native with deep, emotional ties to the city he represented.
Everything changed. He helped put the Bulls back on the map. He helped the franchise move on in ways it never could before.
The honeymoon has waned over the last two-plus years, but it isn't dead. Rose has an opportunity to endear himself to the Bulls even further. This is a savior's return, someone the city of Chicago had, then lost, then had, then lost again. Now that he's back yet again, it's about ensuring he doesn't go anywhere while completing business left unfinished, as Wright Thompson wrote for ESPN The Magazine:
"Everything he wants is right in front of him, and he'll know in a year, maybe two, whether he can have it -- or whether his dreams evaporated when he blew out his knee. All this will be fascinating to watch. His second mission begins now, and, as with the first one, he doesn't know how it will end. Internal drives aren't easy to understand, much less defeat, even if he is healthy; Michael Jordan won every battle he fought, and he is entering middle age unhappy and lost. Derrick Rose escaped his neighborhood and his old life, but he remains a citizen of his own ambition.
"
Where Rose's return drastically digresses from Bryant's is the circumstances under which he's returning.
This year is about him but not him alone. The Bulls won 48 games last season, 42 of which came without Rose. Aside from the point guard himself, they added two sharpshooting rookies in Nikola Mirotic and Doug McDermott, as well as an established veteran in Pau Gasol. They've basically taken an Eastern Conference contender and, in theory, made it better.
Forget grace periods. Rose and the Bulls are expected to win now. They were expected to win without their MVP. His return has only elevated their ceiling, leaving them as the sole threat to LeBron James' Cleveland Cavaliers.
Much of the pressure Rose faces, then, doesn't come from within. Few people, if any, believe in Bryant's Lakers. Even if he plays like 26-year-old Bryant, his team isn't supposed to be anything more than a Western Conference footnote.
Nothing is bigger than Bryant's return in Los Angeles.
Greater things are at play in Chicago.
Important Seasons Ahead
To be absolutely certain, there is no downplaying the value Rose and Bryant have to their respective teams. They are indispensable, and their returns are huge.
But Rose's is bigger.
Ask yourself: What is Bryant to the Lakers now?
A respectability lifeline. A box-office draw.
A link to the past.
No matter what he does—good or bad—the Lakers' future doesn't live and die with him. Even if we're to operate under the assumption that he, for whatever reason, is a free-agent deterrent, the on-court relationship between Los Angeles and himself has an expiration date.
More than that, he and the Lakers have memories to cherish, championships to bask in and a semblance of closure. They are only trying to burnish a storied partnership.
Rose and the Bulls are after titles they don't yet have. They're trying to build something.
With or without Bryant, the Lakers are still in transition mode. This one player isn't enough for them to pursue championships again or revive past ambitions. Rose's return marks the immediate continuation of a dream deferred and, more importantly, a chance for him and the Bulls to chase what the Lakers cannot.
