Like every other second of my day, today I was on my phone, refreshing twitter, as I sat on my couch while simultaneously checking twitter on my computer.
Then, I saw it. A major #WojBomb.
As I sat there trying to process that tweet, I started to imagine life without Derrick Rose and everything got weird for a second. Were the Bulls actually about to trade their hometown hero?
Two minutes later, it happened.
And then, all of twitter broke loose. The floodgates had opened. The 2011 MVP had been traded to the New York Knicks. I didn't want to believe it so I did the most logical thing that any person would do by continuing to refresh twitter. Yeah, it was happening. Confirmed.
Within minutes and countless text messages, reality started to set in. I felt like I had been traded. I felt like I'd been punched in the gut. This is a guy that won an MVP at 22-years old and brought a franchise back to life. Now, four years and three knee surgeries later, Rose is gone. On the same day that LeBron James celebrated winning a championship in his hometown, Rose got shipped from his.
Look, I'm not blind to the fact that these last few years with Rose have not been exactly great. Between his back-scratching comments to the media, his so-called "rift" with Jimmy Butler and most importantly, his health, there certainly were warning signs. Rose is set to make $21.3 million this season before he enters free agency in 2016-17 so it's clear the Bulls had a decision to make. Do they ride it out one more season and hope he returns to MVP form? Is that enough to offer him a max contract with a rising cap? Or, what if he has another down season and the Bulls let him walk for nothing?
You can tell me a million times why this trade made sense and I'm not going to sit here and disagree with you. From a basketball stand point it did and I get that. It just sucks and there's no other way around it. It sucks that Rose had to keep getting injured and it sucks that it had to come down to this. Was it a good deal? Maybe. The sad truth is that Rose did not have that much value anymore and the Bulls needed to make a change this off-season in some regard.
This is a guy that was supposed to be the savior for the city of Chicago; the next Michael Jordan. The Bulls were supposed to rule the NBA over the next decade. Rose was supposed to win a championship for his hometown team.
It hasn't sunk in yet that the next time I'll watch Derrick Rose play basketball he won't be in a Bulls uniform, but rather with Carmelo Anthony in New York wearing a Knicks jersey. Wait, remember when the two of them were supposed to play together in Chicago?
Thank you Derrick Rose for a wild ride the last eight years.
Your move, Jimmy Butler. The floor is yours.