Derrick Rose probably won’t play in 2016 Olympics
By Josh Hill
The Team USA minicamp roster was released on Thursday, and Derrick Rose was nowhere to be found.
After a year of wondering who would be not he Team USA minicamp roster, we finally found out the 34-man candidate list of players who will be vying for a spot on the 2016 Rio roster.
Next summer is when Team USA will look to defend its crown as the best team in the world, but only 12 of the best players in the NBA will be selected to represent their country.
It appears that Derrick Rose won’t be among those 12 players.
Before the running could even really get started, Rose has pulled himself out of the race and won’t be attending minicamp in Las Vegas. While there is still a chance he could be in contention for s roster spot at a later date, it was said by Jerry Coalngelo that attendance at the minicamp in Vegas was mandatory in order to be under consideration for the final roster.
Not all 34 players who attend will make the cut, but they now have a better chance of representing American in the 2016 Olympics than Rose does. It’s unclear why Rose chose to skip the minicamp or if he was left off the roster by Coach K and the powers that be. It bares mentioning that Rose was part of the FIBA World Cup team last summer, as it served as his first action back from missing most of the 2013-14 season with a knee injury.
The presence of Tom Thibodeau as an assistant coach likely had nothing to do with the exclusion of Rose, as his teammate Jimmy Butler is among the 34-players attending the camp.
This will mark the second straight Olympic games that Rose has missed. He was under consideration for the 2012 London roster but tore his ACL to shreds in April, meaning he wouldn’t be a part of the action. Perhaps that injury or the risk of playing internationally on fragile knees is holding Rose back, but it might end up hurting his star power if he isn’t part of another Gold medal team in Rio.
Furthermore, if the feud with Jimmy Butler is real, then having Butler be an American hero in Rio and not Rose probably won’t help things at all. That’s all speculation, but the fact that Rose isn’t heading to Team USA minicamp is something that will have long term effects on his standing with USA basketball.