For most of Chicago, Derrick Rose will always exist in a specific frame of time: explosive drives, MVP chants, and the belief that the city had found its next forever star. Rose knows that version of himself still lives loudly in other people’s memories. He just doesn’t want to live there anymore.
Recently, Rose marked a new chapter in a way that felt intentionally un–NBA. At a pop-up event in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, he wasn’t signing jerseys or talking basketball.
He was selling flowers.
Rose stood behind a counter at a temporary storefront promoting Rose’s Flower Shop, a family-run online floral business, greeting hundreds of fans and hand-numbering bouquets himself.
It was a setting that felt far removed from packed arenas, and that was the point.
“It’s about really living in that presence of not a predictable future and not a familiar past,” Rose explained to The New York Times. “I was done living in that time. I want to live exactly in the middle.”
That mindset reflects how Rose views his basketball career today. While fans still speak about his 2011 MVP season with reverence, Rose has made peace with the idea that his peak came early—and that chasing it nearly consumed him.
Injuries, beginning with his ACL tear in 2012, forced a reckoning not just with his body, but with how tightly he tied his identity to the game. “Once I did figure out I wanted to retire, I felt like I was liberated,” Rose said. “I feel like I could show who I really was as a person.”
That freedom has led him toward creative and business ventures that don’t rely on highlights or nostalgia. Flowers may seem unexpected, but for Rose, the symbolism matters. Growth. Legacy. Building something with family. Creating opportunity. He’s spoken about wanting his next phase to employ people and give back, especially in a city that still claims him as its own.
Basketball hasn’t vanished from his life completely. Rose still watches games, often because his son does, and he remains connected to the sport on his own terms.
What’s changed is the weight it carries. “I have no regrets,” Rose said. “I feel like I maxed out.”