MEMPHIS, TN – After 16 seasons in the NBA, Derrick Rose has called it a career.
This comes following his surprise release from the Memphis Grizzlies on Monday, September 23rd.
Rose was a three-time NBA All-Star, one-time First Team All-NBA Team Member, 2008-09 NBA Rookie of the Year, and the 2010-11 NBA MVP, an award he won at just 22 years old, making him the youngest MVP in NBA history.
Rose announced his retirement through an Instagram post and newspaper ad, with him also telling ESPN “Knowing I gave my all to the game for 16 seasons, I feel confident in my decision… Basketball was just the beginning for me. Now, it’s important to give my all to my family – they deserve that.”
Rose played college basketball at Memphis University in Memphis, TN, and was selected 1st overall in the 2008 NBA Draft by his hometown Chicago Bulls. The Bulls would then make the playoffs each of the next two seasons but got eliminated in the first round each time. In 2010, Rose got selected to his first All-Star Game, an honor he would receive for the next two seasons as well.
In 2011, the Bulls – and Derrick Rose – would fully break out. They would go on to have a record of 62-20, which was good enough for the best record in the league that season. Rose himself also had his best year, with averages of 25.0 points, 7.7 assists, 4.6 rebounds, and 1.0 steals per game. At the end of the season, Derrick Rose was named the NBA’s Most Valuable Player, the first Bull since Michael Jordan to win the award, and the youngest to have the honor at only 22 years old. The Bulls also had the league’s 1st ranked defense and the 11th-best offense.
In the playoffs that year, the Bulls would beat the Indiana Pacers in five games and the Atlanta Hawks in six, before losing to the juggernaut Miami Heat – lead by LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh – in five games in the Eastern Conference Finals.
Unfortunately, this would be the closest Derrick Rose would come to an NBA title.
The next season, the Bulls were once again the top team in the Eastern Conference with a record of 50-16 in a strike-shortened 2011-12 season. The Bulls would face the Philadelphia 76ers in the first round of the playoffs.
In the first game of the series against the 76ers, Derrick Rose went up for a routine layup in the final minutes of the game. However, when he landed, something was wrong. Rose got up limping, and eventually had to be helped off the court. Rose had torn his ACL, and his season was over.
Derrick Rose was the engine for these Bulls teams of the early 2010s, and without him, the team looked lost. They ended up losing the series to the 8th-seeded 76ers in six games, only the 4th team to ever defeat a number-one seed in the first round.
Rose was the type of player to rely on his athleticism, he was always faster, stronger, and more explosive than everyone else. After this injury, he never quite had the same physical advantages as he had before. Over the next few years, Rose would miss the majority of the Bulls’ games, and with the emergence of 2011 first-round pick Jimmy Butler, his time looked limited in Chicago, and in the 2016 NBA offseason Derrick Rose was traded to the New York Knicks.
This begins the dark ages of Rose’s career. He played 64 games for the Knicks in 2016 but was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers that next offseason, only to be traded to the Utah Jazz early into the 2017 season, released immediately, and signed with the Minnesota Timberwolves to finish out 2017. Derrick Rose’s stock had never been lower, and there was a real chance he would have been out of the league in 2018 before he even turned 30.
In 2018, Rose started coming off the bench for the Timberwolves and he provided something that was missing from his game as a young player in Chicago: three-point shooting. That season, Rose would score three points in the highest clip of his career (37%), and he became one of the best 6th men in the league. All of this culminated in Rose’s best game in years on Halloween 2018 against the Utah Jazz, where he scored 50 points off the bench. In a post-game interview, a teary-eyed Rose was informed that he had just scored his career high and stated just how much the game meant to him.
The following season, Rose signed with the Detroit Pistons, and then played for the New York Knicks, and finally, this past year, the Memphis Grizzlies, with him providing invaluable experience and mentorship along each stop of his journey, with that journey coming to an end today with his retirement.
The story of Derrick Rose is many things. A story of wasted potential, a story of hope. A story of tragedy, a story of redemption. But most of all, his story is important beyond basketball. The story of Derrick Rose is the story of someone getting knocked down time and time again, but each and every time, he got back up, a story which everyone can learn something from.
