Rose to the Rafters, Bulls Still Stuck in Neutral
- Drew Stevens (@Drew_H_Stevens)
- 14 hours ago
- 3 min read
The United Center will be loud Saturday night. It always is when Derrick Rose is in the building.
But the noise won’t be about hope, or direction, or what comes next. It’ll be about memory, about reaching backward to the last time the Chicago Bulls mattered.
On paper, this should feel like a landmark moment.
Rose’s jersey taking its rightful place in the rafters after the game against the Boston Celtics should reconnect the franchise to its soul.
Instead, it feels hollow.
Not because of Rose. But because of what he represents, and how long it’s been since the Bulls represented anything close to that.
Rose deserves this honor. He’s the youngest player to win one of the oldest awards in league history, a hometown prodigy who made the Bulls relevant again, who filled the Madhouse on Madison with electricity instead of longing.
For a brief, unforgettable stretch, the Bulls weren’t clinging to their past. They were building something tangible, something urgent, something dangerous, something meaningful.
Which is exactly why this ceremony lands the way it does.
In recent years, the organization has leaned hard into nostalgia. “Derrick Rose Night.” A newly minted Ring of Honor. Now a jersey retirement, complete with MVP burgers, No. 1 nachos, and a Rose Cocktail frozen with a rose in the ice.
None of this is inherently wrong. But taken together, and timed the way it has been, it feels less like celebration and more like compensation.
A jersey retirement should feel like closure. This feels like a reminder:
Rose’s MVP season came in 2011.
The last true contender this franchise fielded existed during the Obama administration.
For all the talk of continuity and culture, the Bulls have spent more than a decade stuck in neutral.
The organization wants this night to feel triumphant. Fans experience it as reflective, and not in a comforting way.
With the Bulls, the past isn’t punctuation. It’s the main event.
The Ring of Honor was supposed to be a bridge, a way to honor history while building toward something new. Instead, it’s become a mirror, reflecting just how little there is to celebrate in the present.
That’s not Rose’s fault. But it’s impossible to separate his legacy from the void that followed it.
Rose symbolizes the last moment when the Bulls felt relevant not just locally, but nationally. When games felt urgent. When playoff runs felt plausible. When the organization appeared aligned around a vision, even if that vision ultimately collapsed under the weight of injuries and mismanagement.
Retiring his jersey now, in the middle of another muddled season with no clear direction, only sharpens the contrast.
Even Rose seems to recognize the gap.
“There is no knock on the guys on the current team… but you need a star,” he said Wednesday on 670 The Score’s Mully & Haugh Show. “Whenever you have a team like this, and it’s stagnant and they’re trying to figure out who’s going to take the lead and find that identity, normally a star fixes that problem.”
His words underscore what the Bulls were and what they are, making this celebration feel less like joy and more like reflection.
Last season’s “Derrick Rose Night” already delivered the emotional release — the ovations, the video tributes, the acknowledgment of what was lost and what was given.
Yes, a jersey retirement carries weight. But the chord has already been struck — this time just louder, because nothing new harmonizes with it.
At some point, honoring the past stops feeling like reverence and starts feeling like avoidance. That’s the uncomfortable question hanging over the night.
What exactly are the Bulls asking fans to celebrate?
That Rose was great? Everyone agrees.
That the franchise once had a future? We remember.
Or that memory itself has become the product?
Rose’s jersey belongs in the rafters. He earned that place through brilliance, sacrifice, and a connection to the city that cannot be manufactured.
But a jersey retirement is supposed to cap an era, not underline how long it’s been since one existed.
Saturday should be about Rose. Instead, it becomes another reminder of organizational drift, another night where the loudest applause is reserved for what no longer exists.
The Bulls can honor their history. They should. But nostalgia can’t sustain a fan base forever.
Fans don’t need more reminders of what was. They need proof of what’s next.