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Derrick Rose Rumors
Bleacher Report: The moment Derrick Rose found he was getting his No. 1 jersey retired by the Bulls 🥹🌹 (Via @chicagobulls )
The moment Derrick Rose found he was getting his No. 1 jersey retired by the Bulls 🥹🌹
— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) August 21, 2025
(Via @chicagobulls) pic.twitter.com/yZyliuGI0J
Jon Krawczynski: Cool event: Derrick Rose will be at Three Stars in Bloomington tomorrow night for a Q&A and opening card packs with collectors. 5:30 pm.
Rose was unaware of his chess-playing peers until his NBA career finished. On Sunday, he had lined them up across the stage, paired with world-renowned grandmasters. Rajon Rondo was once one of his fiercest rivals. Rose and Tony Snell shared a locker room for three seasons. Drew Gooden was one of Chicago’s veterans during Rose’s rookie year; yet they never spoke a word about the game they all secretly loved.
“I had anxiety whenever I (played basketball),” Rose said. “I never have anxiety whenever I play chess. Losing is actually worse in chess than basketball. After you lose in chess, it makes you want to fight. In basketball, I never got that mad. “Losing is the best thing in chess. You start to see how important just one move is. And that one move is a choice in life.”
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Rose was unaware of his chess-playing peers until his NBA career finished. On Sunday, he had lined them up across the stage, paired with world-renowned grandmasters. Rajon Rondo was once one of his fiercest rivals. Rose and Tony Snell shared a locker room for three seasons. Drew Gooden was one of Chicago’s veterans during Rose’s rookie year; yet they never spoke a word about the game they all secretly loved. His vision was meant to play out at Madison Square Garden a couple years earlier. With patience, Rose’s ambition aligned with the Freestyle Chess Tour and the endeavors of its co-founders, Magnus Carlsen — the top-ranked player in the world — and Jan Henric Buettner.
Derrick Rose finds plenty of parallels between basketball and chess. The court and the board are different, but winning in either arena requires many of the same qualities. Patience. Respect for the opponent. Balance. And for Rose, truly enjoying the game requires the same mentality. “I know this is only a game,” he told the Tribune. “You can quit this game. I can walk away from this board. But I can’t quit my life.” In the nine-plus months since Rose retired from the NBA, chess has become a driving force in his life. One of his main goals for his post-basketball career is to enhance the game’s popularity as a gateway to self-improvement.
Although he’s an avid online player, Rose doesn’t keep track of his rating. “I’m a baller,” he joked. “Get me on the board, I might win. I got a jankiness to my game.” Rose isn’t alone in his passion. Chess holds widespread popularity throughout the NBA — as evidenced by Sunday’s event, which featured current and former players such as Quinten Post and Tony Snell. But this shared passion also had a strange aura around it, almost cultish, as Rose described. For instance, former Bulls teammate Drew Gooden is an avid chess player, yet he never mentioned it while he shared a locker room with Rose. So why don’t NBA players talk about chess? “I have no idea,” Rose said with a laugh.
While last weekend marked a notable victory for Rose in his post-basketball career, in the early months retirement was hard. He didn’t know what to do with his mornings. Or his afternoons. Or his evenings. Structure is a constant in the NBA. Rose almost took it for granted. For years, his life followed the heartbeat of his team’s schedule — morning film, bus to the arena, pregame meal, recovery. And then, on an otherwise routine day in late September, all of that went away and Rose was left to reorganize the quiet vacuum of day-to-day life. Coming home helped. Rose is now fully based in Chicago again. After eight seasons of playing in other cities, he has found joy in being embraced by the city.
Ben Golliver: Former NBA stars Derrick Rose and Rajon Rondo are competing in the “Chesstival” tournament in Las Vegas with grandmasters Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura @chesscom
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Q. Jeff Teague on this podcast said that before you had your 50, you went into the locker room and you said you were going to drop 50. Derrick Rose: That's a fact. I asked was he playing? I seen Jimmy Butler wasn't playing and I said it, bro. Q. What was going through your mind? What made you feed off the energy to say, ‘Man, I'm going for this sh*t there.’ Derrick Rose: Like I said, Jimmy wasn't playing and Jeff wasn't playing. That meant that's 20 something shots. I'm going off field goal attempts. That's 20 shots I could get up. If I do my thing and I make majority of this, I can keep shooting. And that's what happened.
Derrick Rose on chess: ‘If kids pick it up, I feel like it helps them somewhere down the line with thinking past that first moment… that first instance when someone disrespects you in front of a bunch of people and you got that pistol on you. Pull it out? Don’t even entertain that, because that person… you never know what they going through. So like, understanding people—everybody’s hurt. And just because they’re expressing it in a certain way, that doesn’t mean that I have to participate in that foolishness.’
You were the youngest MVP ever. So, like, how hard is it to win MVP? Derrick Rose: It's extremely hard. I mean, you’ve got to dedicate your whole life to it, man. I play chess now, so I say you’ve got to make a gambit move. A gambit move is sacrificing a piece to actually get ahead in the game. When I was younger, my gambit move was that I rarely went out. I was kind of obsessed with the game. And with me being obsessed, it kind of led me to get close to that record. I thank God I got injured though—because I tapped out. I would have been stuck and would've become a totally different person. So yeah, it takes a lot of work, bro, to even get close to that. And you have to be delusional.
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