Chicago Bulls: Remembering good times with Derrick Rose

The Chicago Bulls haven’t been very good lately but there is one semi-recent memory that sticks out above the rest. Derrick Rose was in the middle of it.

The Chicago Bulls and the rest of the NBA are currently on pause which probably has a lot of basketball fans fishing for something to make me smile. The Bulls aren’t a good team right now as they entered the pause with a 22-43 record which is good for 11th place in the Eastern Conference. If the season resumes at all they will certainly not be in the playoffs but hopefully, they make the right moves in the offseason to help them forward.

One thing that all Bulls fans can remember fondly is the team in the Derrick Rose era. The Bulls selected him with the first overall pick in the 2008 NBA Draft. He began his career by winning the NBA Rookie of the Year award. He hit the ground running in the NBA which led to him becoming an absolute superstar. In year two he began a three-year streak of being an All-Star.

That also included one of the best Bulls seasons in recent memory. In the 2010-11 season, Rose was the NBA’s Most Valuable Player. Once he started to be recognized for a contender for that award, the United Center would break out MVP chants at just about every home game. The Bulls would go on to the Eastern Conference Finals that year but they fell short to LeBron James and the Miami Heat. They lost the series 4-1 but every game was close for the most part.

The Bulls were good once again in 2011-12. As the number one seed, however, they were eliminated in the first round by the Philadelphia 76ers. Rose missed the entire next season with his ACL injury and then only played ten games in the year after that. Things never got back to the way they were for Rose and the Bulls and he was traded to the New York Knicks in the summer of 2016.

He has also played for the Cleveland Cavaliers and Minnesota Timberwolves since the trade to New York. This season, he is currently playing for the Detroit Pistons. Rose hasn’t been the MVP caliber player he was prior to his injury but he is a pretty good player as of now. It is a shame that injuries derailed those early Rose led Bulls teams because they would have had a chance. LeBron and the Heat/Cavaliers might have a bit of a different history if that Bulls team was able to stay together.

Now that it is long over and everybody has moved on, it is fair to remember those times fondly. The Chicago Bulls and Chicago Blackhawks were both elite teams at the same time so the United Center was a lot of fun every single night. In times like these, it is good to think back on the good moments and Rose provided a lot of those for Chicago sports fans.