Rose's Injury: Who's to Blame? Part 2

Let me preface this article by saying I believe Tom Thibodeau is the best coach in the league.  There is no one else I would have coach the Bulls and he deserves to win the Coach of the Year Award for the second year in a row.

However, just because he is the best coach in the league doesn’t mean he doesn’t have flaws.  It’s like having a spouse who is amazing and you love, but they have a quirk, maybe eating with their mouth open.  It’s not something that will make you love them any less, but it’s something you can address and ask them to change.

This is the case with Tom Thibodeau and how he plays some of his stars.  I’m not blaming him for what happened to Derrick Rose, I’m taking the stance that Thibodeau needs to learn there is a gear besides pedal to the metal and I’m going to blow you out of the water.  No question that the NBA is a star driven league and your stars have to play.  If the Bulls want to beat elite teams such as the Heat, Rose would need to play 40 plus minutes a game in that series, but the Bulls weren’t playing the Heat Saturday.

When you have your most important player and face of your franchise coming off of five injuries, four of them being lower extremity injuries, in the regular season you have to manage him better.  Thibodeau needed to bring Rose along slowly to help his body get closer to full strength.  In the last 22 games of the season Rose had only played five games, and didn’t play more than 2 games in a row.  After missing 12 games Derrick came back and played 39 minutes and injured his ankle causing him to miss a game.  He came back and played 2 games and injured his foot after playing 41 minutes and sat out 3 more games.  Just because Rose was healthy enough to come back and play didn’t mean he was healthy enough to come back and play normal minutes.

When determining if Derrick Rose could return from injury was a two step process.  First the medical staff would clear Rose to resume contact and play, and then Thibodeau would ask Rose how he felt and based on the answer would play him or give him more rest.  Thibodeau has to understand you can’t go off the word of Derrick to determine how hard you can push him.  He’s one of the toughest players in the league and will always tell you he’s good to play.  Derrick will do everything he can to be on the court trying to help his team, which Thibodeau needs to understand and manage Rose more cautiously.  Even owner Jerry Reinsdorf understands this from history.

“I’m one of those people who watched and thinks, ‘Why don’t you get him out of the game?’ “ Reinsdorf said of Rose.  “When Michael was still in the game and he would be in at the end of big wins, I’d Say, “Phil, why don’t you take him out?’ “

Saturday, April 28^th wasn’t the first time the Reinsdorf had to witness his biggest star getting injured.  On October 29, 1985, Michael Jordan’s second year in the NBA, Jordan fractured his left foot three games into the season.  The injury initially was only expected to force Jordan to miss 6 weeks, but with complications and making sure he was completely healthy he ended up missing 64 games and not returning till March 15, 1986.  Once Jordan returned the team limited his minutes knowing how important he was to the franchise.  Jordan didn’t take too kindly to this.  He was irate with team management and resented them for limiting him.

“Jordan said he was getting ‘jerked’ around ‘big-time’ by owner Jerry Reinsdorf and vice president of operations Jerry Krause because of their policy of limiting Jordan’s playing time,” Bob Sakamoto, Chicago Tribune April 3, 1986.

The team realized there was a bigger picture to look at, not just the games immediately ahead on the schedule.  They limited him till he was back to as healthy as possible with the chance of injury being as low as it could before having Jordan play his regular minutes.  In fact, many years after the handling of the injury Jordan was thankful the team saved him from himself.

The franchise back then knew they needed to limit Jordan’s minutes no matter how he said he felt because the overall picture was winning championships, not just a few games.  Derrick Rose is a similar situation.  Games when Rose has come off injuries he has averaged 34 minutes per game, barely less than his 37 MPG average on the season.  Thibodeau was playing with fire playing Rose so many minutes, and unfortunately he got burned.

The problems with coaches and fans are we remember highlights and not the comfortable wins.  The term “no lead is safe” is one of the most well known sayings in all of sports.  When everyone looks back on the weekend of games everyone will remember the Clippers come back from down 24 against the Grizzlies instead of the comfortable 15 point win the Spurs had over the Jazz.  However, those come backs are once in a blue moon.  There were 81 playoff games in the 2011 playoffs and 24 of those games had a team with a 10 point or greater lead going into the 4^th quarter.  The team that was leading ended up with a 23-1 record.  The Bulls Saturday had a 13 point lead going into the fourth.  Sure there was a chance the lead could get squandered and the Bulls would lose, but it wasn’t very likely.

I know many argue that the injury was not preventable, and could have occurred at any time even at the start of the game.  That is true.  This was a freak injury where no one touched Rose and he got hurt.  However, it didn’t happen at a point in the game where Rose needed to be on the court.  Yes the Bulls had given up 8 points of the lead but were still up 12 with two minutes to play, and the game didn’t feel like it was slipping away.  If the 76ers cut it to single digits and the lead no longer felt safe, then bring Rose back in to finish the game.  Thibodeau had to show some restrain with playing Derrick extended minutes and give him a chance to get healthier.

Derrick Rose was like a thoroughbred race horse with health concerns at the Kentucky Derby.  The jockey is going to ride him and push him as hard as he needs to in order to win the race.  If he’s got a comfortable lead at the end of the race the jockey will ease up on the horse and try to help preserve his health because to win the Triple Crown you still need to win the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes.  A jockey won’t over work that horse at the end because they don’t want the horse to suffer a catastrophic injury and have to bring up the curtain on the track.  With the comfortable lead Thibodeau needed to pull back on Derrick and trust the rest of his team to close out the game.  Thibodeau was protecting the oft-injured Richard Hamilton by resting him at the end of the game and the same should have applied for Rose.

Thibodeau has proved he’ll be one of the greatest coaches in Chicago Bulls history, but moving forward he needs to tweak his ideology on how to balance minutes and health.