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The captain was ready to play Friday night against the Boston Celtics. As long as the captain of the toes, the big toe of Derrick Rose, was ready.

“I’ll probably lose a step, but this is just preparing me for when I get old,” Rose joked before Friday’s game against the Celtics after missing Wednesday’s game with a sprained big toe. “I know when my adrenalin get to going I’m going to forget all about my toe.”

You’d think sometimes this was an epidemic as many times as Rose has been asked how he was. His mother likely never asked as often. But that’s also the nature of sports these days, and Rose seemed just fine about it all.

He said his shoe company, Adidas, sent him an insert so he cannot bend his toe.

“It hurts a little bit, but I should be all right,” Rose said after a shooting workout on the court. “Just got to fight through it. I would say the great players find a way and I want to be great. It’s something I just have to fight through. It’s not stopping me.”

Rose said the sprain/turf toe is a condition he’s dealt with regularly since his second season in the NBA, though not with the pain he suffered after being fallen on against the Timberwolves.

“It hasn’t hurt it like this,” Rose said. “I’ve been getting a lot of treatment on it. Hopefully it should be ready.

“I was very surprised when I woke up the next morning and I couldn’t walk,” Rose said about predicting he wouldn’t miss a game. “That was something that scared me. I went to get X-rays on it. The x-rays were negative. It wasn’t a fracture and I didn’t do anything else. It was juts like a jam or hyperextending my toe.

“I have turf toe,” Rose said. “That was a sprain. That’s all it is. Turf toe is just a hyperextended toe. Turf toe is nothing but a sprain.”

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