As former Chicago Bulls point guard Derrick Rose looks back on his time with the media in this city, he has plenty of qualms as to his image and treatment.
At the end of his tenure with the Chicago Bulls, former superstar point guard Derrick Rose found himself amid a ton of turmoil with the media and possibly even the coaching staff and front office. Often we get to see D-Rose look back on his time in the Windy City with the Bulls and how sour it ended before he was traded to the New York Knicks. Rose and fellow former Bulls star Joakim Noah we’re both sent to the Knicks during the 2016 off-season.
We did get to see Rose speak out even more about his media and treatment from the Chicago Bulls executive and PR personnel lately. One former storyline from nearly a decade ago that resurfaced heavily this summer is the involvement of the Bulls in trying to land former Cleveland Cavaliers superstar forward LeBron James and Windy City native shooting guard Dwyane Wade.
The common school of thought held it that Derrick Rose wasn’t overwhelmingly in favor of LeBron or D-Wade linking up with him and the Bulls. But the communication at that time across the board between the Bulls and the camp of D-Rose was usually poor. Once the injuries started pouring in for D-Rose starting two years after the infamous LeBron decision, the media and fan base really seemed to start turning against him.
Granted, there was a lot of confusing signals and silence that was coming out of the Rose camp.
With Rose Seth to hit free agency this summer, this created the perfect storm of discussion with how he handled the LeBron and D-Wade situation back in the 2010 off-season. Wade just retired from his long NBA career with the Miami Heat. He is likely to be a future Hall-of-Famer. But LeBron did have trade pressure swirling around the Los Angeles Lakers at time entering the summer months.
There were two pieces released from the Chicago Tribune within the past 24 hours that highlighted Rose’s ending with the Chicago media and how he felt about the failed recruitment of LeBron nine years back. The report regarding Rose’s former recruitment was done by Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribune.
And the other report from Rose on the way that his relationship with the media was strained in Chicago, and how he feels the perception of him was wrong during LeBron’s 2010 recruitment was done by Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribune too. Rose covered in that piece that he was wrongly covered by that.
This portion of the article also gave good insight into how he felt about the LeBron situation:
"While Rose writes he’s not big on “What if?” scenarios — and this probably isn’t going out on a limb — he believes the Bulls would have won at least one title if James had signed with them instead of the Heat."
It is an interesting thought as to how the Bulls would fair in the Eastern Conference about six or eight seasons ago if LeBron landing in the Windy City instead of with D-Wade in Miami. But even D-Wade landed with the Bulls for one season, which did not go very well.
Would anything be different now if Derrick Rose were to have another stint with the Chicago Bulls? The answer to that is more than likely no. He is such a polarizing figure in sports in the Windy City that the national and local media would be all over him.