NEW YORK — He spent 16 days wearing a suit and tie instead of a blue and orange practice uniform. He spent more than half of October sitting in a Los Angeles courtroom while the rest of his team got to know one another 3,000 miles away. The details of his sex life were exposed to the public. His absence forced his bosses to answer questions they didn’t want to field.
This, it’s safe to say, was not how Derrick Rose or the Knicks envisioned this preseason playing out, certainly not when just two months earlier Rose was “thanking” the Bulls for granting him “another start” by trading him to the Knicks, and certainly not when in late September Knicks president Phil Jackson was blowing off questions about Rose and saying he didn’t “anticipate” Rose missing any part of training camp or preseason games.