It didn’t particularly matter where Derrick Rose had disappeared to on Monday night. The disappearance itself sufficed, both as a comment on Whatever The Hell’s Going On With Derrick Rose These Days and as a new apex in this Knicks team’s ascent toward cock-eyed Knicksiness. A day later, we’re still in the speculation stage, hoping for a Woj report about Rose bursting into the Knicks locker room wearing a full suit of armor and gasping about a perilous encounter with the Franks, and hoping, because the issue was probably some family emergency type thing, that Rose and the people he cares about are okay. Knowing what we know at this moment, the situation is at least interestingly ridiculous, recalling the time back in 2010 when Rose was supposed to appear on an episode of “The Good Wife,” then refused to leave his house when a driver hired by the show pulled into his driveway to take him to the airport.

Rose is difficult to know how to feel about these days. Watching him play basketball is a sad and frustrating experience. He might, if his lower extremities were sturdier, be operating at his peak right now, angularly driving the lane as if the rim were at the bottom of a hill, but instead he’s in a permanent state of disrepair and seems not to totally know it, hogging the ball in tight fourth quarters while Carmelo Anthony and Kristaps Porzingis stand to the side, arms akimbo and puzzled. He called the Knicks a superteam after being traded to New York in the offseason, which would be true if he was up to his MVP-contending form. Of course, that hasn’t been the case for years.

And there is the rape charge, which has gone away in a concrete sense—Rose and two friends were deemed not liable in a civil suit that ended this past fall, and he’s unlikely to face criminal charges—but claims from a woman that the three men drugged and raped her cannot be easily scrubbed from the mind, nor can the vivid details of the alleged incident, which included the woman being so messed up that she picked burning gemstones out of a fireplace. As sports fans, we are not well-positioned to deal with weighty, chilling stuff like this. It requires a swift and jarring mental swerve to start considering whether an athlete has done something awful, because we’re usually thinking about nothing so important as the look of his three-point stroke. We can anchor ourselves with facts—women, in overwhelming numbers, do not tend to lie about sexual assault—and still struggle for clarity, still wonder how we got to what we’re talking about.

Last week I examined Rajon Rondo’s decline, which has been sharp, near-total, and upsetting for anyone who enjoyed his curiously effective stylings back when LeBron James was ringless and the Celtics were a dominant Eastern Conference power. As abruptly as Rondo fell off, we at least got to see him play some extraordinary playoff basketball within the context of a great team before his knee popped and Danny Ainge decided it was time to break up an aging, title-winning core. The Bulls had a single postseason run with a fully healthy Derrick Rose, the year he won MVP, and he staggered like a newborn foal in his Eastern Conference Finals meeting with the Heat, shooting just a hair over 30 percent in the last two games of the series, both of which were close defeats, and turning the ball over eleven times.

We never got anything like the best out of Rose, not when it mattered. We thought he had plenty of time to grow and create memories, but it turns out the guy’s runway was built a mile short and, improbably, the superior Bull of the Derrick Rose Era turned out to be Joakim Noah, who’s carrying the aftereffects of dragging around a mostly Roseless Chicago squad for three seasons in his now-dead legs. Rose didn’t do anything wrong, precisely, during his injury-addled years, and the team undermined him by publicly setting return dates he didn’t agree to, but rumors abounded that he wasn’t apt to play through any kind of pain and when he did play, it became evident that he couldn’t put more than a few good performances together without then beginning to look labored and unsteady. He was shipped to New York over the summer because sometimes a player and a team accumulate too many resentments to be together anymore, and because the Knicks have no sense of direction. Sure, Phil Jackson will take a flyer on a busted shoot-first point guard, not giving much thought to how it could break bad.

Another notable difference between Rondo and Rose is that Rose has a choice as to whether he’s done being a useful player. Rondo looks beat: checked out and immutably ornery, noticeably slower than he used to be, hard to place in a league that values shooting a lot more highly than it did a half-decade ago. Fred Hoiberg recently benched him during his own bobblehead night, which is as solid an indication as any that Rondo’s finished in Chicago and possibly finished with the NBA. Rose is 28 and salvageable. His first step is still quick and he’s a streaky shooter. The numbers aren’t encouraging—they haven’t been for a long while—but if you catch Rose on a night when he’s spry and not playing with complete recklessness you can sense that he has something left to give. The trouble is he isn’t aware of his own limitations.

After this vanishing act, the Knicks’ interest in keeping Rose around has likely bottomed out, but he’ll have suitors in July. The crucial question is whether any teams that come to Rose will pitch him on a narrower role than the one he’s inhabited his entire career—one that perhaps puts him at the head of a second unit, or uses him more as an off-ball slasher—and if Rose would listen to that kind of offer or screw up his face and walk out. If there’s one thing we understand about Derrick Rose after all he’s been through—and put us through—it’s that he doesn’t see himself the way the rest of the world does. But he can’t get away with that for much longer. He’s running out of time to get real.