Former Chicago Bulls head coach Tom Thibodeau believes the team would have won an NBA championship had Derrick Rose not suffered a torn ACL in the 2012 playoffs.

Thibodeau appeared on ESPN's “First Take” to discuss his tenure with the Bulls in the 2010s, citing his belief that Rose's injury probably robbed the team of a title (via Dan Santaromita of NBC Sports Chicago):

“The thing that I’m most proud of, in Chicago we had the best record in the league two years in a row,” Tom Thibodeau said. “We had Derrick Rose, who was the youngest MVP in the league. That team had a great chance to win a championship and unfortunately Derrick got hurt, but if Derrick didn’t get hurt, I thought we would’ve been champions.

Rose went down in the final two minutes of the Bulls' Game 1 victory over the Philadelphia 76ers in the first round. The injury would be a string of many that plagued him the next couple of seasons, though Chicago still managed to make the playoffs in each of the next three years.

Thibodeau has every right to make the claim. The upstart Bulls — led by MVP Rose — reached the Eastern Conference Finals in 2011. Though they were dispatched in five games by the “Big 3” Miami Heat, it looked like the beginning of a battle for supremacy in the East.

The Bulls had the best record in the NBA in a lockout-shortened 2012 campaign, and they seemed primed to challenge the Heat once again.

But Thibodeau and Co. would never get that chance. The Bulls would lose to the Sixers in the first round after Rose's injury, and they never made it back to the Conference Finals again before Thibs was fired after the 2015 season.