Remember when Rose said, " why can't I be MVP?!"? When has Rise made this kind of a declaration regarding team success? The MVP is very much a team award. If your team is awful you have little to no chance of winning MVP. So, you can't say his team didn't help him achieve this. But, to this point, his teammates won't win MVPs, although Noah thus year is as close as it comes for a non elite player to something like this. But Roses teammates have constantly made the requisite sacrifice to win. It's helped Rose win an MVP and it's helped the Bulls win a playoff series when Rose turned his back on them. It's easy to wonder if Rose is just some selfish dude who is on his own team. You also wonder if his teammates also realize this but won't allow he selves to admit it.
When Jordan was in his 2nd year, he already had the big shoe contract. He broke his foot in October. As the season wound down, the Bulls were floundering with Jordan sidelined from his foot. The Bulls were verging on not making the playoffs. Jordan started butting heads with the front office and insisted on coming back to play early. The Bulls did manage to barely make the playoffs, which meant they were first round fodder for a great Celtics team (that won the title that year). But had Jordan not come back, the Bulls would have never made the playoffs, which means the world wold have never seen the 63 point game in Boston Garden.
Another, example of Jordan voicing aspirations for team success came in 1989. That year the Bulls had lost every regular season game against the Cavs. There was a lot of noise about this when the Bulls had to play the Cavs in the first round ( best of 5 then). With all the noise focused on certain demise, Jordan predicted the Bulls would win the series in 4 games. He was wrong. It's a good thing because game five is the game where he hit a would be game winner with 6 seconds left only to see the Caves score on a give and go off the inbound pass with 3 seconds left. But those three second of that game 5 will live for the ages as those three seconds were the three seconds that produced "the shot".
People think of these as a testament to individual greatness, and they were, but the unmentioned backdrop was a piping hot desire to achieve team success. In 1986, perhaps stupidly, he put his health on the line by coming back early so that 1986 wouldn't be a lost season for his team. And in 1989 Jordan put himself on the line by predicting a win in a series over a team that they hadn't defeated all season.
We have one guy on the roster (maybe two) who has that competitive fire and is deeply motivated by team success. And that person certainly isn't Rose.
