If there's one way to describe the career of Minnesota Timberwolves point guard Derrick Rose, it has to be “resilient.” At several points in his roller-coaster ride of a career, the bitter end appeared to be in sight, and his once unmatched potential seemed destined to be put to waste.

This includes a couple of leaves of absences from both the New York Knicks and Cleveland Cavaliers, which Rose took to attend to mysterious personal matters. The 30-year-old recently tried to make some sense of these peculiar occurrences that almost cost him his career.

According to Rose, the time he took away while with the Cavs was primarily because his body was just not feeling right.

“I wasn’t able to run for a couple of weeks, and that’s why I took the break, because I didn’t know what was wrong,” Derrick Rose told Shams Charania of The Athletic. “People were saying, ‘You got a bone spur, everybody got bone spurs.’ I ain’t everybody. I just found this out, fam. And my body is not like y’all. I got to do three or four times the recovery that y’all do just because of my speed and how explosive I am.”

Rose went on to say that the leave of absence also had something to do with a desire to get a breath of fresh air from a truly stifling predicament.

“I was just trying to figure myself out,” he added. “But at the same time, I played on the same team where I’ve seen guys leave the team and go out of state and work out for two weeks and wasn’t around us. What’s the difference? I’ve seen Joakim go to Hawaii and come back with a tan while we were playing and had those good teams.

“So don’t act like I’m the outcast because I did that. It ain’t like I was playing.”

With regards to his leave while with the Knicks, Rose admitted that it was something that was more personal above everything else.

“New York, yes, I was playing. My fault. I take all of that blame,” Rose said. “But in this Cleveland situation, don’t act like I was playing. I wasn’t playing.”

Obviously, Rose believed that his time away while with the Cavs was more acceptable because he was dealing with an injury and not playing.

The good news for Derrick Rose is that these issues appear to be a thing of the past. Hopefully, he has fully moved on from his demons and can slowly work his way back to (even just half) the player he once was. He has shown flashes for the Wolves to start the new campaign, so at the very least, that's a good indication.