Derrick Rose was once the future of the NBA. Now he’s the present of the New York Knicks.
If that sounds a bit drab, well, it really kind of is, isn’t it?
The Knicks, once again seduced by the memory of past feats and possibilities of glory regained. They’ve thrown these dice and lost before.
Rose, who by the analytics hasn't been even a good player in about four years, and who by the eye test still doesn't look any closer to being the same player who was the league's youngest-ever MVP than he has at any point in the last five years. Who was already weary of the ghosts of expectations in Chicago, now moving to New York.
It’s a match made ... somewhere.
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The one obvious thing is it’s not hard to root for this to work. Half a decade ago Rose was the most exciting thing in basketball, and it would take a particularly soulless individual not to want to see him recapture some part of the electricity that once flowed through him. The Knicks are, or at least should be, a cornerstone franchise of the NBA, and they’ve been diminished long enough. A good Knicks team would be good for the soul of the game.
The one obvious problem is it’s hard to actually envision this working. Even if he had never suffered any of his injuries, Rose will be a 28-year-old point guard next season whose best attributes were his speed and explosiveness, who can’t and never has been able to shoot a three in a league where that has suddenly become one of the most important skills for any wing player.
New York already have one high-usage mid-range isolation beast of questionable defensive value in Carmelo Anthony. The game’s best, probably. Even if Rose can get back to that standard, how exactly do they share the floor?
Maybe he can reinvent himself as a pass-first point guard, running two-man action with Anthony and initiating drive-and-kick looks for Kristaps Porzingis.
Maybe his old spring will come back in a new setting, and he can refashion himself as the kind of hyperactive two guard that thrives in the triangle offence.
There have been flashes. Every now and then Rose will explode past his defender to the rim and, if you saw it in isolation, you would think nothing ever went wrong in his career. He will, occasionally, still rip off a step-back jumper and the soft-touch floater here and there. He still has a good passing eye, he can probe and break down the defence in the middle.
But he just doesn’t have the legs to do quite all of that, at quite an elite level, quite more than infrequently. And it’s a pretty dubious proposition that he will again. More likely, what the Knicks are buying is a instinctive attacker without elite physical attributes to be truly effective and with a broken jumper.
For their part, the Bulls get a highly underrated centre in Robin Lopez, one who will ably fill the Pau Gasol/Joakim Noah void and should pair well on the floor with now-officially-sanctioned franchise cornerstone Jimmy Butler. They get Jose Calderon, who at 34 is still a serviceable NBA point guard. And they get Jerian Grant, who has skills and the foundations of a good defensive game and can maybe yet be moulded into something.
For the chance to move on from the stagnating disappointment of the Derrick Rose era and the $21 million (Dh77m) he is owed next season, that is not bad at all.
For New York, it is also a reasonable price, all in all. If you squint, you can just see him recapturing enough of his old self and teaming with Anthony and Porzingis for one of the more uniquely dangerous attacks in the league.
There is a universe in which this works out phenomenally for the Knicks. It's just that it's been so long since Derrick Rose was that Derrick Rose, that it's hard to really imagine it being this particular universe.
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