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What the City of Chicago Really Lost When Joakim Noah and Derrick Rose Left Town

No two athletes in Chicago have done more to try to offer solutions to Chicago's growing gun violence than Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah.

Four years ago, Cobe Williams, a Chicago ex-convict who has made it his life's work to stop the violence on the South Side of his hometown, saw Joakim Noah tweet about the documentary The Interrupters. Williams stars in the film, which follows him and a few friends as they routinely go into Chicago's most dangerous neighborhoods and "interrupt" fights before they start.

Soon after that tweet, Williams and Noah connected on Twitter, and ended up meeting at a P.F. Chang's in Deerfield, Illinois to discuss ways Noah could do something to help quell the rising violence in Chicago. At first, Williams was unsure what to expect. But within a couple weeks, he brought 15 gang members from Englewood out to Deerfield to eat dinner with Noah. As Williams describes it, Noah did not touch his meal. Instead, he immersed himself in the stories of 15 forgotten young men. Later, they went to shoot hoops at the Bulls practice facility. No press or Instagrams documented the occasion. This was for the kids.

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It's hard sometimes not to be glib about NBA free agency. Take out the breathless, wall-to-wall coverage, the Reddit conspiracy theories, the crazy money, and the flurry of players switching teams, and the NBA is like any other business. The New York Knicks signing or trading for a Chicago Bulls player isn't much different than a company like Uber poaching Facebook's Head of Communications, or Danny Meyer finding a new sous chef from a Brooklyn restaurant.

Read More: Justise Winslow Is Ahead Of The Curve

But what has happened to the Bulls and the city of Chicago this summer is different. Rose's operatic highs and lows and Noah's indomitable on-court spark will be missed by basketball fans. But putting sports aside, the loss of both players in a single swoop is devastating—particularly the people who can't afford $200 tickets to the United Center.

.— NEW YORK KNICKS (@nyknicks)July 8, 2016

No two athletes in Chicago have done more to try to offer solutions to Chicago's growing gun violence than Rose and Noah. The numbers are staggering. As of June 20th, the city has suffered over 300 homicides, including 13 on Father's Day weekend alone. The city's murder rate has more in common with Rio de Janeiro than New York, and no authority figure has a clue what to do about it. The combination of shuttering the city's massive housing projects—which led to gang members and their families being dispersed among each other—easy access to guns from just over the state line in Indiana, and the segregation of the city as a whole has created what is, in effect, an American war zone.

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Hailing from 73rd and South Paulina in Englewood, Rose has been immersed in the troubles of the neighborhood his whole life. He has paid for and attended funerals of children caught in the crossfire of bullets. He is a success story from a place that does not have many. Rose is not and will never be a great interview. Part of what made his injury struggles so sad is that he's truly a guy who just wants to play basketball and be left alone. He's not a "brand," an entrepreneur, or an actor. Because of this, we rarely get to see the real Rose in public. That's what made this clip of Rose crying at a shoe event after talking about the violence in Englewood so real. Getting out of Englewood for Rose was the win; everything else is the cherry on top.

Noah's backstory with the city is a little more unconventional. Growing up in the Northeast, the son of a pro tennis player and a supermodel, Noah's background couldn't be much more different from Rose's. Yet when he arrived in Chicago, Noah dove head first into fighting the seemingly unending violence that would have been easy for him to ignore. Alongside his mother, Noah started a charity called "Noah's Arc Foundation," aimed at raising money and awareness for the problem. "Noah's Arc" is the polar opposite of most athletes' limited foundations. According to Williams, who works at the foundation, they've now expanded the program to Philadelphia, New York, and Jamaica.

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Noah eventually teamed up with Williams and Reverend Michael Pfleger (a fascinating priest and political force) to make a real difference on the south and west sides of Chicago. Noah would frequently go to barbecues and dinners with teenagers in Englewood and Bronzeville, giving them an outlet to talk through their issues with one of their city's most famous residents. Noah and the foundation created a basketball tournament called "One City" where kids from all over the city's most dangerous blocks could come and play with a goal of unifying Chicago. Noah would have kids from different troubled neighborhoods at nearly every one of the Bulls' 41 home games each year. He became such a presence in Englewood, Bronzeville and some of Chicago's most dangerous areas that when he would show up with Williams at different community events, he would know nearly as many people as people knew him.

"A lot of people come through the neighborhood but Jo is really one of a kind," Williams said. "I know one of his goals is a NBA championship, but to him helping these kids is like winning a different kind of championship."

.— NEW YORK KNICKS (@nyknicks)June 24, 2016

Rodney "Hot-Rod" Phillips, a former gang member and "interrupter," tells a story about Noah from 2013. A young teenager had been murdered in Bronzeville on the South Side. Noah, who didn't previously know the boy or his family, visited the family and friends of the boy during the year. Phillips recalls the shock and surprise from many in the impoverished neighborhood when Noah showed up, with no press or security with him, and played basketball with the young boy's friends.

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"Jo's compassion for humanity differentiates himself from the other famous people who've been in and out of the community," Phillips said. "Somebody instilled this compassion in him and we can see it in his personal interactions with people here. He sits and listens to the people of the community who are struggling. He genuinely cares."

While Rose has a more withdrawn personality than Noah, he too has made a significant difference in his former neighborhood. A couple years back, he donated a million dollars to after school programs for Chicago public schools, and he has both publicly and anonymously footed the bill for the funerals of young Chicago children murdered in the crossfire of the city's violence epidemic. (Rose's legacy in Chicago could become complicated. A sexual assault civil suit was filed against him last summer, although he vehemently has denied the charges. The trial is scheduled to start this fall.)

While most "interrupters" are personally closer to Noah—some were at Noah's welcoming press conference in New York—Williams also raves about the work Rose has done, like Noah, when the cameras are not present.

Mikey Davis, a community activist from Englewood, Rose's best friend Tim Flowers, and Rose himself are currently planning a series of benefit concerts on the South Side, in order to raise money for different community events. While Davis is sorry to see Rose playing in New York, he is adamant that the work Rose has done in the community will continue. "Those guys are still putting in work on a daily basis," Davis said. "Through us, or coming down to the neighborhood themselves, they haven't stopped working."

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Hometown boy Derrick Rose, pictured with son DJ, meant more to the city than just his stats on the basketball court. Photo by David Banks-USA TODAY Sports

When Reverend Pfleger got word that Noah and Rose would be leaving Chicago, he told the Chicago Sun-Times, "I've never met anyone in the NBA that cared so much about community, especially at a time when our city is going through this horrible rise of violence. [Noah] comes by our [youth center] and sits and talks with the guys, with the brothers who feel no one cares about them. He stepped up to help stop the violence. He and Derrick Rose. Amazing men."

Davis was equally heartfelt in his praise: "There's not really anybody else of their status that do this kind of thing down here as much as they do and genuinely mean it."

This work in community centers in Englewood and parks in Bronzeville may not make onto national sports broadcasts, and it may not matter to those in charge of the cold analytics of putting together a basketball team. But if a sports team is supposed to represent the place where it plays, it will be a long, long time before Chicago finds two players who cared more about the city than Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah did.

That's what irreplaceable really means.

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