In his clearest statement yet about a projected return to playing professional basketball, Chicago Bulls point guard Derrick Rose announced today he will not come back from a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee until he is a minimum 880 percent.
Rose said he’s at about 620 percent right now.
Rose, who is dominating practices with the team and dunking from the half court line, said there is no specific target date for re-activation, and that he will remain on the injured reserve list for the rest of his natural life if need be, until he reaches the 880 percent mark.
“I don’t have a set comeback date,” Rose told a gathering of the Chicago Hypochondriacs Club on Monday, where he was being inducted into the chapter’s Hall of Fame. “I’m not risking another rupture of my ACL until it can withstand a G-force equivalent to the gravitational pull exerted by a black hole at the center of medium-sized spiral galaxy. And who knows when that can be? It can be within a couple of decades. It could be next century for all I know. Infinity, how about infinity?”
“You just can’t rush this thing,” explained Rose, while performing a 2,300-pound leg squat.
Confirming Rose is still far away from coming back to the Bulls lineup was team surgeon Dr. James Andrews, who has performed 426 major operations on the brittle MVP guard since 2008.
“Every injury’s different,” Andrews said after examining an x-ray of Rose’s perfectly healed and well rested left knee. “And Derrick’s at 600%, maybe 620% tops, which means he has a 1 in 32,756,800,121,870,380,271,237 chance of re-injuring the ACL, and that’s just not a gamble he’s willing to take.”
Rose has told Bulls fans who want to know exactly when he will be ready to play again to “go buy a Ouija board.”
