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Rose believes load management would've helped him remain a Bull

Gary Dineen / National Basketball Association / Getty

Over the last decade, few NBA superstars had their careers derailed by injury as significantly as Derrick Rose. After becoming the youngest MVP in league history in 2010-11, Rose missed large swaths of the next three seasons with various leg injuries, ultimately leading to the end of his tenure with his hometown Chicago Bulls.

Now with the Detroit Pistons - his fourth team in four years - Rose believes things would've been different if the concept of load management was more prominent at the time in the NBA.

"It was just a different time in the sports world, period," Rose told NBC Chicago's Will Perdue. "Now we have the term load management. I don't think I would've taken it as far as Kawhi (Leonard) ... but if load management would've been around, who knows? I probably would've still been a Chicago Bull by now."

Rose missed the entire 2012-13 campaign after tearing his left ACL in the 2012 playoffs. Meniscus tears in both knees later limited him to an average of 42 games over his last three seasons in Chicago.

Still, Rose said that he wouldn't change anything about his eight seasons with the Bulls, even with the pressure of being a hometown hoops prodigy trying to fill the shoes of Michael Jordan.

"I wouldn't have wanted it any other way but how it played out," he said. "I achieved a lot here. I loved it here. This is my hometown. But when I look at the old footage of the documentary, it kind of reminds me of a younger Mike Tyson, in a way where you got this talented, gifted individual and they're just locked into their craft. And they don't care about what's going on on the outside. They don't care about who they're getting compared to."

The 31-year-old still shows flashes of his old attacking ability and is averaging 18.4 points this season - his highest per-game output since 2011-12.

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