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Back in happier times for Derrick Rose, I wrote a troll-y, if sincere, piece about his game. I called Rose too brusque, not ornamental enough for my liking; without taking anything away from his effectiveness, I wanted to look at the role taste plays in what kind of players we embrace. The angry reaction didn’t surprise me. Nor did Rose’s unintended response. In a national win against a Spurs team that was done hibernating for the year, he dropped a career-high 42 points and threatened absolute NBA supremacy.

What did catch me off-guard was when Chicago radio hosts Terry Boers and Dan Bernstein patiently explained to me, on the air, that they weren’t mad. I just didn’t get it. Rose’s game was pure Chicago. The courts he came up on were physical, cold, windy, and infected with the city’s love of football. Rose, whose gifts might have lent themselves to a more showy style of play, did what he had to do: He put his head down and went at the basket, making one key move and then exploding at the rim. Rose wasn’t clipped wings, he was meat and potatoes dripping uranium.

That’s the view I’ve had of Rose ever since. And that makes it even harder to make sense of Rose’s latest injury, a torn meniscus that could have him on the shelf for five months. [Editor’s note: shortly after this story was published, the Bulls announced that Rose will miss the rest of this season, including the playoffs.] It also, at this rate, seriously raises the question of whether Derrick Rose will ever be the same again. Generally, mourning injuries like deaths is ghoulish and melodramatic. With Rose, though, there’s such an incongruity between the player and this path, I can’t help but prematurely struggle with the idea. No, hoping for the best is not an option.

In the grand lexicon of injury stories, the ones that work best—that is to say, can be spun into something other than sheer disaster—are the ones that carry an element of fate to them. Either the player burned too brightly to last; their style of play flew too close to the sun; they took so many chances, on and off the field, that losing everything fit into their world. Maybe they went too hard, maybe they just upped the ante of creativity to somewhere nearly Faustian. Maybe they never deserved elite status to begin with; injury was karma lowering its blade.