He’s gone from a No. 1 pick and a city’s great hope to an injured star whose career is in jeopardy. But to Greg Oden, that’s in the past – he’s looking up, and for good reason.
Jumping was still uneasy, and the agility hadn’t returned all the way. A timetable for his return? Most estimates didn’t even begin until the start of 2011. But there was Greg Oden, the No. 1 pick in 2007 NBA Draft, attempting to swat away the only thing he could: Doubt.
He’s spent more time in street clothes than a Portland Trail Blazers uniform, but Oden can still play defense. When he did see the court last season, 21 times to be exact, the seven-footer notched 8.5 rebounds and 2.3 blocks in under 24 minutes per game. So his thoughts on that b-word that rhymes with rust? He doesn’t let it bother him.
“I kind of let it wash off my back,” says Oden. “All those people go, ‘Well he needs to stop getting injured, he’s a bust.’ I’m not going to go out there and say, ‘I’m not going to get injured today.’ … Don’t try to judge me because of my unlucky streak with my injuries.”
He felt good, he emphasized, chatting casually by phone in late October, adding that he changed his rehab approach this summer while hiring a chef, losing 20 pounds and working out with a purpose. His voice spoke with confidence, if annoyance, at the keywords of the conversation: injury, injury, promise, potential. He was engaging, talking offhand about taking a trip on a whim to watch Oregon and Stanford play in a top-10 football game on a fall weekend. Back talking basketball, he spoke as good a game as he knew he could play. If you listened carefully, it sounded like, just watch.
Two weeks after we first spoke, it turns out, he hadn’t lost a step. Rather, it was his season that was gone. And now, the League waits to see if he’ll be just as quick after a third major knee injury.
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Portland turned its back on the Jail Blazer squads in the middle of the decade, with fans leaving in droves from the ranks of season-ticket holders. Then, buoyed by a younger team that found the playoffs led by Rookie of the Year Brandon Roy and LaMarcus Aldridge, the old passion was back. The capper was supposed to be Oden.
It hasn’t quite turned out that way.
Once fed up with the problem of a team that was largely indifferent, Portland now has a team that is largely injured. And Oden, the centerpiece of the rebuilding effort, is still in the middle of it all – no matter how far the rehab facility is from Portland’s One Center Court.
In fact, Oden’s career summary is more of an orthopedic surgeon’s cruel bingo card than the resume of a No. 1 pick three years into his career. Right wrist. Microfracture surgery. Right knee. Foot. Chipped left knee cap. Fractured left patella. All together, it’s as stop-and-go as a career has ever been for a player as highly touted as he was as a one-and-done from Ohio State. The thinking is he’s three-and-done now with his trio of major injuries. The thinking, anyway, of those not named Greg Oden. His goal? To prove, again, that he can be more than just a salary-cap contributor once he returns. It’s not just a matter for his pride; he’ll be a restricted free agent this summer and can test the market, such that it is for a player with his history. It’s a very serious probability few, if any outside the Trail Blazers, could offer him the chance. But that’s all Oden wants.
Says Oden, “I want to get out there and be able to dominate.”
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Oden is the guy who came to Portland with a welcome rally the size of a city block, the keystone to a title run with shoulders big enough to carry a team for a decade or longer. He dreamed out loud of a dozen Larry O’Brien trophies, and the only mention of “bust” you could hear in Portland then pertained to the ordained superstar’s expected likeness in the Hall of Fame.
A crack in his foundation changed that. The second major injury, the patella fracture in December 2009, deepened it. It also changed Oden the player, he said, still a teenager at the time.
“It’s tough to be the happy-go-lucky guy you are with all the pressure from people who want to see me play,” says Oden. “And our fans haven’t had the chance to.”
Even his childhood friend and college teammate Mike Conley – who signed a five-year, $45 million deal with Memphis this November while Oden failed to sign an extension – could notice the evaporating expectations surrounding him.
“It bothers him a lot and you can see it in his face at times,” says Conley. “You can’t not root for the guy, because he’s putting in the work.”
Sixteen-year NBA vet Grant Hill sees a similarity in the bizarre stretch of non-stop injuries that’s hit Oden, and the wondering of how to stop it. Hill’s career nearly was ended by botched ankle rehabilitation from 2000-03 after six superstar years in Detroit. Hill had the advantage of being a star before his injuries, but the setbacks came out of the blue nonetheless. The only ankle injury he ever had, he said, was a sprain when Christian Laettner accidentally pushed Cherokee Parks into him at practice his sophomore year at Duke. His first four years in Orlando, he played a combined 47 games, including missing the entire 2003-04 season.
Hill and Oden spoke together in the month after Oden’s latest injury, to discuss their shared stretches of injury and misfortune.
“It’s one thing when you get hurt, but when you get hurt with a season-ending injury year after year after year, that’s when it becomes extremely difficult to make sense of it all,” says Hill. “He’s been so young and had this misfortune and not really had a chance to establish himself and understand the NBA game. Your heart goes out to anybody with struggles like he’s had.”
Let us not put a pen to paper on Oden’s basketball obituary just yet.
Oden says he trained harder than he ever had last summer, going at it with a different edge after public relations gaffes last season – nude Internet photos, a botched 21st birthday party – showed his immaturity. While Conley said he’s still “the same guy” who likes movies and staying in, he saw a different demeanor from Oden in the summer. Not the guy who put on pounds of muscle after the rookie-year surgery that looked to be more for beach than basketball, but one with a determined edge he’d rarely seen before.
“I want to be able to play how I play and jump as high as I used to jump,” says Oden, who said he didn’t heed criticism that he was no longer a game-changer.
Portland Oregonian columnist John Canzano, a careful witness to Oden from draft pick to present, summed up a third recovery this way: “I’m not sure he has it in him.”
“All those people, I’m not listening to them,” say Oden. “I know it’s not my teammates saying that, I know it’s not my coaches saying that. All that is people talking.”
Then came the second microfrature in November, this time on the right knee, after which Lakers forward Ron Artest suggested to “rest for a year and a half.”
Taking that long, which isn’t a figure to necessarily brush off, would require a team to take a free agent gamble. Conley believes it’s not much of one to take.
“You can’t pass up on too many big guys,” says Conley, who still texts or talks with Oden at least once a week. “You see the talent in them. It’s not like he came out here and played and done so bad he can’t play. It’s just the fact he’s injured.”
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Bumper stickers around Portland with yellow type on a black background boast “Keep Portland Weird.” An enterprising businessman would do well to make ones that read “Keep Oden Healthy,” though there’s a risk that they’d be useless if he’s no longer a Blazer after his contract runs out this summer.
Oden will be a restricted free agent when his four-year rookie deal expires. The last No. 1 pick not to sign an extension after his third season? Kwame Brown. Trail Blazers President Larry Miller publicly has stated that he believes Oden is worth a one-year, $8.8 million qualifying offer.
“He is going to be a restricted free agent this summer,” said Blazers GM Rich Cho in November. “I expect him to be a part of the team. He will be restricted, he will be able to look at other teams.”
Portland could be one of few who gaze back. Though injury fatigue may have hit Blazer fans after 13 players missed a combined 311 games last season, and after knee troubles have brought fresh concerns about Roy’s longevity, the Blazers could recoup the spoils of an above-average big man.
Think of it this way: When he has played, he’s been very productive. Stats compiled by Blazers blog Blazers Edge found he grabbed nearly 22 percent of all rebounds when he was on the floor in 2009-10, and his blocked shots per game were up more than 100 percent from the year before. A big who can be solid on the boards and blocks, ala Erick Dampier and Theo Ratliff, can carve out a niche for years. It’s not a sexy comparison — but it’s also not sitting around as an unemployed ex-player, either.
Oden’s injuries are bizarre, but in a way, their unprecedented nature gives reasons for hope: they can’t last forever and you can bounce back. Zach Randolph, who underwent microfracture surgery on his knee in Portland, is still a dangerous scorer and rebounder in Memphis who made his first NBA All-Star team last season.
The same kind of work Oden put in this offseason, the one that impressed even a player in Conley he’s known much of his life, could give the best glimpse at a “new” Oden. In the week before his latest injury, reports and video of a workout at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 30 showed fluid moves from a player still two months away from seeing the court. Maybe now Oden will find his missing hard edge — the 7-footer said he grew up wanting to be a dentist — because he knows there’s no room for error. Fear of a final failure could drive Oden to the kind of production the quirky rookie with the three-year-deal cushion might never have reached.
“He has a huge future ahead of him,” says Carlos Boozer. “I don’t know how many games he’s played, but it’s not nearly as many as he’d like to. I’d tell him to keep his head up and a lot of people are counting him out. I’d tell him not to give up.”
Time isn’t on Oden’s side, but it is what he believes he still deserves.
“Have I had a lot of time to be on the court and improve? No. I’ve played 82 games in three years,” says Oden, who has averaged 9.4 points, 7.3 boards and 1.4 blocks in that time. “I look it as once I’m on the court and have a chance to improve, I can surprise a lot of people.”
Given his druthers, he’d have a post-op highlight reel akin to Blake Griffin. However, a player in the mode of Marcus Camby could be more of a target. The former No. 2 pick overcame injuries and returned to be NBA Defensive Player of the Year in 2007; then held together Portland’s lineup last season by putting up 7.0 points, 11.1 rebounds and 2.0 blocks per game after a late-season trade from the Clippers.
“If he doesn’t make that jump to be a dominant big in the League, then a Marcus Camby type of player,” say Conley when asked about Oden’s ceiling when he returns. “Those are very, very good players that people need to win games. It wouldn’t be a downgrade or anything.”
And what about the case of Hill? His mental rehab, even more important than the physical, in some regards, he said, came from ordinary sources.
“It could be the ‘Seabiscuit’ book, or Lance Armstrong. … As crazy as it sounds, those types of things connect for me,” says Hill. “‘Rocky,’ all those different types of stories. The reason why they work and are so successful is everyone can relate to overcoming something. You’ve got to believe when no one else believes. You’ve got to have faith.”
When Oden returns sometime in 2011, it is likely that he will have lost some part of his game that was at the very heart of the reason why Portland picked him first. But it could very well be that Oden returns with something new – the patience and perspective to know he doesn’t have to take a team and a city on his shoulders. And possibly, creating a second career for a player who has barely had a first.
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