Chicago Bulls point guard Derrick Rose likely tore his ACL because of weakness caused by prior injuries that accrued over the course of season, as one surgeon from the University of Chicago explained in a Q-and-A about the player's injury.
As explained by Dr. Martin Leland, muscle fatigue likely played a major role in Rose going down:
[Rose] went to make that sudden stop, and normally, if he was a little bit stronger, his muscles would have fired and kept his knee still. But his muscles were fatigued and they just gave out, and once they gave out, his knee started going into that position. Basically, he was coming in and stopped with such force that normally his muscles would have kicked in and stabilized his leg, but because his muscles were weak, his knee just kept going, and then ruptured the ACL. So it was really the fact that he wasn’t at 100 percent strength, and the fact that he was fatigued at the end of a game.
During the regular season, Rose missed 27 of Chicago's 66 regular season games with a variety of injuries, but none of them were remotely as serious as this. It looks like those little injuries proved to come back and bite Rose in the end, though.
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