Derrick Rose: What the Chicago Bulls Star Has Learned About His NBA Future

I don’t always believe that sports will teach you life lessons. I was in fifth grade when my bowling team won a state championship. Not sure I learned a damn thing from it. I was in eighth grade when my pee-wee football team won a dismal three games with 12 players. I sucked, and I’m not sure I learned a thing from it.

But Derrick Rose can learn a lot from his series against the Miami Heat. They may not be life lessons, but they are just as important.

I’m not one who believes that a champion must lose along the way to learn the value of winning. Joe Montana won early in his career, Tom Brady won in his first season as a starter. Even Tim Duncan was a champion right out of the gate.

But for Derrick Rose, he can learn a lot from losing to the Miami Heat. Not at first. Initially there will be some pain, anger, regret and self-doubt. These are the emotions of any loss, at least the emotions any athlete that truly cares about victory and defeat will feel. But once time passes, Rose will learn a thing or two from this series.

He’ll learn that timing is everything. While the Bulls owned the Heat in the regular season, they played a different Heat team in the Eastern Conference finals. Sure, a case can be made that the Bulls caught big-time stars at a time when they rose to the occasion, but I’m not convinced that was the case.

This was a matter of the Heat finally figuring themselves out as a unit. Had the ECF been played in February, we might have been looking at Chicago with a 3-1 advantage. But wrong place, wrong time.

As Rose looks back at the Heat’s defensive scheme—a maddening series of double-teams and great help defense that seemed to castrate Rose and his dribble penetration—he will learn that he must rise above it. That somehow, some way he must figure a way past the double-teams and to the rim. Not an easy task against great defenders like the Heat, but it’s something that he knows he has to learn.

Maybe that includes developing a feared jump shot. While Rose has stumbled in the postseason, make no mistake that at 22 he’s as serious about his future as anyone in an NBA uniform. Rose will learn to be better, to play better and to overcome better.

But Rose will need help. The journey to victory doesn’t come out of hardship. It doesn’t exist out of simple mental toughness. Winning, in its plain and least poetic form, comes from help. Every great player needs it. LeBron James, no matter how classless his Decision was or what anyone thinks of him now, needed help. Dwyane Wade needed help. Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Bill Russell all needed help.

Rose has a deeper cast than LeBron ever had in Cleveland and a deeper team than Miami has now, but make no mistake: There is a void in the Bulls' eight-man rotation, and it’s glaring in games against a team like the Heat.

They need a strong second presence. I believe they could have had a different series with the Heat had Courtney Lee or O.J. Mayo been on the roster, but the Bulls have lacked that other figure to keep Miami honest, to halt the double-teams and allow Rose to get to the rim.

See, we as sports fans value the journey. It’s why we make LeBron the villain and praised Kevin Garnett for staying in Minnesota as long as he did. We love the idea of putting in the work and having it pay off years down the road. It’s why we loved the story of John Elway or even Gary Payton. It’s why, beyond just the Heat haters, we’ll be rooting for Dirk Nowitzki in the Finals. His is the better story—the last shot at redemption. We love our movie endings.

But winning isn’t about the journey. It’s about the math. The better team—that plays better at the time—wins. If the Bulls lose as expected, Rose will feel all those emotions of losing, but it won’t make him better. If he didn’t have it in him before to push past it, grow from it and be better from it, then he won’t be helped by this now.

By the time a pro gets to the NBA level, he largely is what he is. Few players grow into something else. Jordan was always a winner. Nothing that happened in the pros changed that. He was just able to prove it consistently. Rose, in my estimation, is a winner.

To be a winner he’ll have to be better, as will his team. He gets no brownie points for defeat. Just a sting that lasts as long as it takes him to erase it.