FanPost

Rose and the Wolves : once a Dream, now a nightmare

The recent signing of Derrick Rose brought back a lot of memories for me. To understand why, I’ll explain it in full.

As a French teenager, becoming and being a NBA fan wasn’t easy. Games in the middle of nights, on some expensive channels my parents couldn’t afford, internet growing up but not yet the indispensable thing it is today… lots of hurdles. How did I become an NBA fan you might ask? Video Games. First NBA live on PS1 and later NBA2K on dreamcast, were how I got my love for the sport of basketball. You don’t imagine how many hours I spent playing the later game. After trying several teams to see which one I liked the most, came the moment: I played with the Timberwolves and a guy named Kevin Garnett. Here, my wolves’ fandom is born.

His combination of size, speed, strength, etc. made him the best player in this game. Officially, Iverson had a better overall grade, but he was small and the gameplay being far from perfect, you could block his shots half the time with basically any player in the game. Tim Duncan also had a better grade, but he was slow, you couldn’t get around defenders with him like you could do with KG. I scored primarily with him, the others on the team (guys like Terrell Brandon, Joe Smith or Wally Szczerbiak) would only score if they got the rebound. I found some German channel where they showed extensive highlights of the games and watched it when I could with my class schedule. The first season I could do it regularly? 2003-2004 of course. Even though they didn’t win the title, my love for the Wolves was cemented.

Then, well from that moment things went south for the team and in 2007, the big bang happened: KG got traded to the Celtics. The team went to rebuild-mode and Garnett won the title with his new buddies. I watched the Celtics games during that run and even if they won the title, something was missing for me to switch allegiance. As a reporter from my home country said recently, fandom is not about wins, it’s about stories. Most of the time it’s your dad taking you to watch a game in a stadium at a young age that get you hooked up. That’s stronger than any championship win. For me and the T’wolves, the story is a bit unconventional I guess, but it exists. With the Celtics, there was no story.

As I still watched some Celtics games to see KG, they played the Bulls in the first round of the playoff in 2009. An epic, 7 games matchup with close games, lots of overtimes and game-winning or -tying shots from both sides. One guy on the Bulls roster made an impression: a rookie point guard named Derrick Rose. His quickness and athleticism were off the charts and I liked watching him play. The block he made on Rondo at the end of one of those games was crazy, almost video-game like. I was also attracted by his personality, as he was not really out-spoken, more of an introvert like I was. I rooted for him when I was watching Bulls games that weren’t against the Wolves.

I had a hard time following the Wolves during that period: constant " rebuild " for many years, lots of failed draft picks, no real star I liked. Al Jefferson was good but not franchise-player material, same for Kevin Love. Those 2 had great stats but getting big numbers on a bad team is overrated in my mind. As for Ricky Rubio, well he is from Spain, France’s arch-enemy on the European Level, so it is hard to love a guy you’re going to hate in the summer competitions. I was still supporting the team and wished them the best, but as I followed less and less Wolves games, I watched more and more Bulls games.

I liked the Thibodeau-coached team, tough teams playing hard defense. As a soccer full-back who knew how to tackle, I could only like it. Plus they were the enemies of the "Heatles", so that helped. Thibs was a tough coach, he reminded me one of my youth soccer coaches, who asked a lot of his players on the field, made them work hard in practice, but on the other hand, he would stand by their side when things got difficult. That’s how I saw Thibs, a strong paternal figure.

Rose won the MVP in 2011, became my favorite player and I started to think: "If only he was playing with the Wolves". Of course, if someone told me it was going to happen 7 years later, I would have laughed: Why would the Bulls trade a MVP-level player in his prime to the Wolves? That’s a thing the Wolves would do (they did it with KG and Kevin Love after all) but the Bulls? Not possible.

But things went also south for Rose and the Bulls when he broke his ACL. I remember watching that game live and be devastated. He never got his athleticism back and the Bulls would join the Wolves in the irrelevant teams’ category. His professionalism was in question when he refused to play while being cleared by doctors. After being traded to New York, it got worse with the time he went AWOL and missed a game, and then more this season in Cleveland when he took some time off the team. And of course, there’s the sexual assault trial. I fell off my chair when I read the news.

Rose injured, Thibs out as a coach and the Wolves still rebuilding, at the same time I finished my engineering studies and got a job, I watched less and less NBA games. It was fun watching some great teams like the Spurs and now the fast-paced Warriors, but again, something was missing. I needed a spark to motivate me.

That spark, you guessed it, came when the Timberwolves hired Thibs. Oh boy I didn’t see that one coming. Going away from the trend of offensive-minded, spread and pace style the league is in right now, that hiring obviously got my attention. Thibs isn’t a rebuilding coach, so I knew he would make things interesting. As if I needed some more, the Jimmy Butler trade a year later and the signing of Taj Gibson confirmed it: he’s here to win. Overall, he did a great job, even tough you can nit-pick some individual moves, in the big picture, he’s taking the Wolves in the right direction. Before Butler’s injury, the team was third in the Western Conference standings. Usually, when you had the words "third" and "Timberwolves" in the same sentence, it was to talk about lottery odds, draft position or some statistical analysis with "third worst something".

When Rose was traded to the Jazz and then released, becoming a free agent, rumors of him re-uniting with Thibs were obviously intense. I was sure it wouldn’t happen. It made no sense at all. Jeff Teague has been great since he came, Tyus Jones is becoming a reliable backup and Aaron Brooks isn’t getting a lot of minutes as a 3rd string, so why add a 4th point guard? His level of play, health and motivation are questionable at best, and the team needs wing players with outside shooting, something Rose was never great at. But it happened. What was a dream at first became true, but it doesn’t feel like a dream now.

Out of respect for Thibs and Rose, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Thibs is loyal to a fault and Rose is one of his guys, like family, so he can’t let him down even in the worst situation. Call it crazy, but in the end I respect that. Rose already said that he wants to prove doubters wrong and now that he’s signed, I can only hope he will. Maybe he’s like Butler, he needs a tough coach like Thibs to be at his best. We’ll see soon. It’s a make or break, last chance move for him. Thibs also has to make sure he plays Rose the right way, if he doesn’t want to be criticized more than he already is. They are together in this, they better make sure it works.