Looks like Greg Oden will probably miss the entire season with a knee injury. It seems to me that at this point we should consider the possibility that Oden may be officially Injury Prone, which is really not what you're looking for in the savior of your franchise.
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Happy in Seattle
13 Sep 2007 04:12 pm
Comments (33)
As a Seattle resident and fan, I have to say things are looking good for the Sonics and their new fans . . . in Oklahoma City.
As a resident of the Pacific Northwest, this sucks. I was looking forward to pulling for Portland after the moving fans arrive for the Sonics.
As a Celtics fan, I laughed out loud at the news. Making me a terrible person, of course, but all I could think about was how man Boston fans would be throwing themselves off bridges now if the Cs had won the draft lottery.
Mike
Yet another piece of evidence that Oden is really 43 years old.
Players like that are always going to be injury prone. It's why Reggie Miller didn't attempt a comeback. Oden should have shown the same discretion and stayed retired.
Portland drafted Injury Prone Sam Bowie instead of Jordan. They're used to disappointment.
Look on the bright side, Portland fans: you now have basically no talent, so maybe you can get another high draft pick.
This is all pretty mindless analysis frankly.
Injury prone? He had the wrist thing and this knee thing now.
As described, the knee thing is what Stoudamire had. When I watched last year, Stoudamire looked fine.
Sam Bowie played four years at Kentucky and was hurt ALL THE TIME. Bowie's shin condition was CHRONIC.
Bill Simmons column bragging about how he said Durant was the right pick was simply revoltng. And I love Simmons. Despicable piece from him.
Frankly, are you folks so sure Durant is all that? Has anyone considered how stupid they sound when they compare Durant to Jordan? They don't?
I'll remind them next year.
There was no way to know Oden had this knee problem. His previous injury was his WRIST!!
Sam Bowie's problem were chronic and continuous from high school through college.
This is insanely stupid stuff I am reading from smart people.
Armando: I haven't seen one single person here say Durant was the right pick. That would be a ridiculous argument. Oden was clearly the right pick. Now he's hurt.
Players can also be seemingly injury prone with a series of unrelated injuries. I'm thinking of Marcus Camby in particular.
It's just bad news. Period. Oden seems like a great guy and an exciting player. It's too bad we'll have to wait a year to watch him. And after so many hits and misses with lottery picks, how much longer are we going to engage in the tedious debates over them? Sports fans always love to act like all decisions were made with perfect foresight. Red Sox fans are currently lamenting the acquisition of J.D. Drew and blaming the front office for not predicting that Drew would have a bad season. Sometimes GMs make mistakes, but sometimes athletes have bad years and bad careers. That's all there is to it.
Bill Simmons column bragging about how he said Durant was the right pick was simply revoltng. And I love Simmons. Despicable piece from him.
It's amusing how Armando's sports blogging is rhetorically indistinguishable from his blogging on the war, Supreme Court nominations, etc.
Injury prone? He had the wrist thing and this knee thing now.
Don't forget the tonsillectomy earlier this summer. Whatever he's got is really spreading - from his wrist to his tonsils to his knees in one year. Not good.
"As described, the knee thing is what Stoudamire had. When I watched last year, Stoudamire looked fine."
Hate to disillusion you Armando, but while Amare looked quite good last year, he didn't have the kind of off-the-meters athleticism he had pre-injury.
And Stoudamire is far and away the best microfracture success story we've yet seen. For every one Stoudamire, there are many, many McDyess's and Kenyon Martin's.
This injury by itself definitely doesn't mean the end of Oden's career, but it's not close to being insignificant either. Microfracture knee surgery is always amazingly bad news.
Even in a best case scenario, look for Oden to not be fully back up to speed until after Edwards' first 100 days in office. These guys are always still hobbling around the court 12 months after the surgery.
Has anyone considered how stupid they sound when they compare Durant to Jordan?
Just because Durant's not the next Jordan (and he's not) doesn't mean Oden can't be the next Bowie.
thankfully for Oden, he is a member of an enlightened league which honors contracts despite injury occurrences (unlike Football).
its a bad loss for the entire NBA. what a tough year to be an NBA fan.
"Even in a best case scenario, look for Oden to not be fully back up to speed until after Edwards' first 100 days in office"
Wow, that's a really long time. 2012? 2016? 2020?
I think everyone being a little premature in declaring Simmons wrong about Durant. Give the guy at least a season. The handful of Texas games I saw last year, Durant just looked silly. I think he's going to be a dominant player in the NBA in a few years.
Simmons' "Oden walks funny" column is pretty stupid, though.
This Oden thing is just awful. Even if he recovers OK and becomes a hall of famer, we'll still be wondering what might have been. He's never going to get his full explosiveness back.
"its a bad loss for the entire NBA"
It's good news for Western Conference teams like New Orleans and Golden State that are going to be on the playoff bubble next spring.
Portland now looks like a clear lottery team instead of a bubble team.
As Portland resident, but not a Blazer fan (a recent transplant):
I wonder if people will be trying to return all of the season tickets that were purchased after the Blazers won the lottery...
and if the NBA and networks will take away the national broadcasts they gave to the Blazers because of Oden.
Ha! How dare you mention my Warriors in the same breath as New Orleans! A bubble team? The Lakers are a bubble team. The Warriors are 50 wins waiting to happen.
As you can see, I'm as rational about this as Petey is about John Edwards' chances, or Allen Iverson's value to an NBA team.
When I watched last year, Stoudamire looked fine.
Look more closely. He's lost some explosiveness. He just had some to spare.
And Stoudamire is far and away the best microfracture success story we've yet seen. For every one Stoudamire, there are many, many McDyess's and Kenyon Martin's
Stoudamire, McDyess and Martin's games were predicated on outstanding hops. (See also, C-Webb.) Guys whose greatness are not so predicated on hops, but rather are more skill oriented, do better - Jason Kidd, John Stockton, etc. Where Oden fits among those, I dunno, but I'd venture to say more like Kidd than K-Mart.
Well, since Bowie's been mulled over enough, I'll change sports and cities and topics to agree with SomeCallMeTim and others -- it's hard to come back 100% from a serious injury (I think missing a season = serious here).
Watching the Seahawks' Curt Warner after he came back from his Kingdome turf knee mugging was a sad thing. Afterwards he was a good running back but beforehand he was crazy good -- his sideways cuts were jawdropping even on a small, crappy teevee.
Now he (Curt) has the consolation of a car dealership near Portland, and advertisements showing him in a Seahawks-colored uniform, without logos.
Like Tim said, Stoudamire is pretty clearly not the player he was pre-surgery. I think that would be more visible if he wasn't getting great passes from Nash all the time.
Thing is, Stoudamire had a whole lot of raw athleticism to spare, he could lose some and still be excellent. Oden doesn't. Nor does he have a superhuman skill set to fall back on like Kidd's passing game. It's not quite clear what he has yet beyond great size and ability to dominate the paint. But I think it's a pretty good bet that bad knees won't help. What will that do to his shotblocking ability, for instance?
Oden's athleticism is (was?) pretty amazing. Not as flashy as pre-injury Amare, but he had an incredible combination of size, strenght, speed, agility and hops.
His shotblocking doesn't depend too much on his hops -- he has some incredible timing instincts. But what if the injury throws that off? What if part of those instincts is the ability to get off the ground quickly?
By the way, I heard that Oden aggravated an injury he originally suffered in combat in Da Nang.
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
"Ha! How dare you mention my Warriors in the same breath as New Orleans! A bubble team? The Lakers are a bubble team. The Warriors are 50 wins waiting to happen."
Dude, you lost your second best player and there seems to be a decent chance your coach will either retire or come back and intentionally sabotage your team.
All that said, you're a highly likely playoff team if Nellie is happy and BD plays 75+ games. But BD is obviously unlikely to play 75+ games.
And don't sell New Orleans short this year. I'd say they're a better than 50/50 shot to make the playoffs. Even Memphis could pass GS if things aren't quite right by the Bay.
God. Microfracture.
Yeah, I'm trying to ignore that Nellie thing. I'm not too worked up about J-Rich leaving. Obviously, the trade would have worked better if they could have turned Wright into Garnett, but Wright should be a decent contributor in the near future. J-Rich is a great guy and a good player, but he didn't seem to fit. For a guy who's so explosive, he slowed the offense down a lot.
I say, if Nellie is there and BD plays 75+, they win 50-55 games. If BD plays between 60 and 75 games, they win between 45 and 50.
Its a good thing the Blazers are pretty stacked with guys that can play the 4 & 5 spots. Looks more likely we'll see both Aldridge and Frye -playing the 5 with Outlaw, LaFrentz, and Przybilla in the bigs rotation. The Blazers may even run more then they intended to with Oden.
"J-Rich is a great guy and a good player, but he didn't seem to fit."
I'm actually quite curious about how good GS is going to be without him.
Nellie never wanted him, and I deeply respect Nellie's judgment, but I don't follow the logic in this case.
J-Rich obviously had a difficult season last year due to coming back from injury, but I see him as a high quality contributor.
You guys obviously have tons of talent to work with, so maybe Nellie has roster combinations that will prove better without J-Rich, but, as said, I just don't see it.
And at a minimum, given that the over/under on BD's games played is 58 1/2, J-Rich could've helped provide firepower in the BD-less games.
I don't expect Wright to be a big contributor next year.
The trade may well have been a smart deal long-term for GS, but unless Nellie has some tricks up his sleeve I can't decipher, I don't see it making them better next year.
(And as an aside, while I understand you wouldn't want to see this as a GS fan, for someone like me with League Pass it'd be immensely amusing to watch them in Nov and Dec if Nellie decides he wants to get fired. He'd throw out some really weird fivesomes if that turns out to be the scheme.)
None of this matters to me.
I live in Minneapolis. 1 or 2 additional wins against Portland gets us to, what, 29 wins?
As a Portland fan, one of whose formative childhood experiences was the Sam Bowie fiasco, this brings up a lot of bad memories that I'm just not keen on re-living. My childhood trauma has come back to haunt me. I feel like Dr. Schreber. I'll be ignoring the NBA this year. Again.
We heard endlessly the arguments that you Just Could Not pass up drafting a potential franchise center. From my point of view, though, it seems that true big men are far more injury prone than, say, small forwards. Maybe drafting a potential Shaq gives you a slightly better chance at winning championships, but drafting a potential Kobe (couldn't bring myself to say Jordan) gives you more raw wins in the long term.
I'd love to hear if there are any studies out there that list the average career duration of players by position. An even better question might be, say, the average # of games missed due to injury of starting players, by position, since I would suspect that even dinged up centers can get re-signed, just because there aren't that many of them.
Go back one injury-prone Portland big man past Bowie and you get to Bill Walton. I think the people of Portland would take that.
If Oden plays every other year, he's a better pick than Durant. Hell, you might be able to alternate between lottery picks and serious playoff runs.
Comments closed September 27, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
As a Seattle fan, I have to say how sad I am to hear this....ok maybe not....
Posted by Col Bat Guano | September 13, 2007 4:21 PM