Empty the Bench

Greatness is why we watch. We watch waiting and hoping for the rare individual to present a performance that transcends himself and his situation. There are few athletes in the world even capable of doing it once or twice in their lives. The ones who can do it with any degree of consistency and, most importantly, the ones who do it with greater consistency the bigger the stage and the more important the situation are the great ones.

The NBA Playoffs are their museum.

Watching them and just knowing it’s possible that today they could have one of those performances is electric. And the reason we NBA heads love the NBA is because in no other professional sport do we have the opportunity to see individual and team excellence present itself in such fluid, dynamic physical poetry.

On Saturday afternoon in the opening game of the 2009 NBA Playoffs Chicago Bulls point Derrick Rose, this season’s consensus Rookie of the Year, put his name into the conversation as latest NBA great one.

The latest guy who can do it.

He spent the regular season breaking ankles and turning around the fate of his franchise, earning the Bulls a playoffs birth. Then the biggest game of the season thus far went down on Saturday afternoon against the defending champs. Derrick Rose responded, as the true stars are apt to do, with his best performance of the year.

All afternoon you could tell the 20-year-old kid had something special going on, responding to every big play by Boston with aplomb. He was efficient, cool yet aggressive, and deadly with the ball. An alley-oop here, a killer crossover there, a drive-and-dish on occasion and regularly putting his team on his back, beating the entire vaunted Celtics defense down the floor for coast-to-coast buckets.

With just over seven minutes left in the fourth quarter, playing on the road and in front of a national audience against the defending champs, Rose brought the ball up the court, dropped a hesitation dribble into a crossover and exploded to the baseline. He rose up, draped in Celtics white by Stephon Marbury, Leon Powe and Eddie House, and threw up a gorgeous teardrop from seemingly behind the backboard as he fell out of bounds. Today, the ball had no choice but to go in. And one. In a game that wasn’t short on fireworks it was the play of the day.

The bucket gave him more points on the day than he had scored in any regular season game. Minutes later, two clutch free-throws gave Chicago a 97-96 lead with 9.4 second left in regulation and made him 12-12 from the line for the game. Chicago went on to win in OT on some clutch Tyrus Thomas (what?!) jumpers.

Rose’s final line in his first career playoff game: 36 points, 11 assists, and 4 boards on 12-19 from the field and 12-12 from the line – and one big W on the road against the defending champs. His 36 points tied Lew Alcindor, aka Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, for the most in NBA history by a rookie making his postseason debut.

That’s stepping up. That’s greatness. That kind of performance is why we watch the NBA Playoffs. As Jon Barry said, “This kid is out of this world.” That about sums it up. If this is what he has for us at age 20, well, I can’t wait to see what he can do over the next decade, let alone the next month. The kid is something special.

Derrick Rose Photo Credit: Icon SMI

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