The Top 10 Definitive Chicago Bulls Dunks
No. 4 – Derrick Rose
The Rose saga has taken a sad turn thanks to injuries and other events that are currently unfolding outside the world of basketball. Before all of that, he was an absolutely terrifying dunker. If you Google it, you can come up with a handful of alley-oop lobs that Rose absolutely annihilates. Those days are likely gone forever, just like our lament about Noah.
This is both a joyful and painful remembrance for Bulls fans. Rose was the best thing to happen to the Bulls since the days of Jordan and Pippen. Until he was the worst thing to happen to himself. His body was capable of such ferocious athleticism that it didn’t seem possible. I’d compare him to one of my favorite baseball pitchers of the past decade – Tim Lincecum.
They were both capable of incredible feats and ascended to the peak of their sport at relatively young ages, but the way in which the played their games caused their bodies to betray them earlier than most. For Lincecum, particularly unique pitching mechanics were unsustainable and his arm simply couldn’t handle the torque any longer.
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Rose had an incredibly aggressive, explosive, dangerous style of attack on the court. Eventually, the measures put in place to protect his injury-susceptible ankles forced his knees to compensate, and then they no longer could do so.
The Bulls pushed the Big Three of the Miami Heat. They pushed them very hard. Rose captured exactly what that threat looked like when he exploded to the rim for an and-one dunk. That was another time and place. In the video Tom Thibodeau looks like a younger man more so than the Transylvanian overlord that now roams freely in the wilds of Minnesota winter (I assume it is always winter in Minnesota).
To be honest, I actually wanted to use this dunk on Greg Oden more than the dunk against Miami. Rose is the definitive post-Jordan Bull. He was supposed to lead the team and their legion of fans back to the promised land. Oden was supposed to be the next great big man. Both had different career trajectories, different stories. Both lost the battle against their own bodies. That was a time of potential, when the Bulls and Blazers both thought they had something sustainable.
Next: No. 3 All-Time Dunk