Rose’s ACL means Miami Heat a lock to the Finals

The Miami Heat just became the favorites to win the Eastern Conference thanks to a horrible injury to the top seeded Bulls. In the final minutes of yesterday’s Win for the Bulls star point guard Derrick Rose went down with an ACL injury.

Rose suffered the injury with 1 : 22 left in the game. He tried to leap off his left foot in the lane but on his way up you could see that he did something wrong to his left knee. There was no contact on the play and this is true of most ACL injuries. Besides this latest injury Rose was having a injury prone season. He missed tons of games and hurt a lot of different body parts. This is for sure a season last year’s MVP will want to forget.

Many will wonder why Rose was on the court so late in the 4th quarter especially with his injury plagued season. The Bulls did have a 20 point lead late but the Sixers did cut it to 12 with 2 minutes left. So you could see why Rose was still in the game. Here was Bulls head coach Tom Thibodeau’s response to that question after the game.

“I don’t work backwards like you guys do,” Thibodeau said. “The score was going the other way.”

“He’s got to play, and the thing is, we sat him ’til [the 7:53] mark of the fourth and he’s got to work on closing, he’s got to work on finishing,” Thibodeau said. “Our team, we didn’t handle that part great. That was what I was thinking.”

Bulls player’s reaction to the Rose injury.

“My heart,” said Richard Hamilton, “kind of dropped … It was scary, not for just us. but the whole city of Chicago.”

“Come on man, he’s the MVP of the NBA, so it’s tough,” said Joakim Noah. “But you know what, there’s basketball to be played.”

“It’s like the saddest win,” Bulls shooting guard Kyle Korver said. “Regardless, we’ve got to pick ourselves up. We’ve played a lot of games this year without him. So maybe it was just getting us ready for this.”

“It’s tough,” Carlos Boozer said. “It seems like he just can’t catch a break. … I just feel for him, man. He really can’t catch a break this season.”

With the Bulls playing many games this season without Rose they know how to play without him. They are still a pretty darn good team without him. I see them beating the 76ers and possibly beating the Celtics or Hawks, but there is no way they can get past the Heat. That’s why you can pencil in the Miami Heat into the NBA finals that is unless one of their players gets hurt also.

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