It's hard to call somebody a "victim" when they've made $20 million and mostly been an observer, but as has often been said over the past few years, none of this could have happened to a nicer guy. [...]
The defining moment, for me, remains a little less than a year ago in a game against Houston. Oden was lying on the Rose Garden Arena floor, with his kneecap several inches lower on his leg than kneecaps are supposed to be, and his first instinct was not to wonder, "Why me?" or to angrily curse the basketball gods.
It was to tell Roy, "I'm sorry."
His career has been a letdown, and he knows it all too well. That's made Oden's star-crossed history in Portland at times unbearable. The expectations, the comparisons to Kevin Durant, the ridiculous questions about Sam Bowie (as if there were some correlation between his fate and that of another player selected 20 years earlier) -- all of it has weighed on him.
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Can he come back?
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Oden, however, is 7 feet tall and nearly 300 pounds, which means that he can come back a little slower or lose some jumping ability, and it will have very little material impact on his value as a basketball player. He'll still be just as imposing a physical force when he returns, so as long as he can make it up and down the court, he'll be a valuable center; of that I have no doubt at all.
Where the doubt seeps in is that he may very well injure himself some other way. Oden has had three serious knee injuries and none of them appeared to involve contact with another human being. In between, he chipped a bone in his knee and sprained his foot. One gets the impression that if the knee didn't get him, something else soon would have.
But consider the many counterexamples.
Exhibit A: Zydrunas Ilgauskas. As with Oden, his lower limbs strained under the weight of carrying his huge frame, and he had so many foot injuries he considered retiring. In one three-year stretch, he played only 29 games. In his first five years in the league, he played 111.
Sound like anybody?
But Ilguaskas shook off all the surgeries, and followed it with a five-year span in which he missed 14 games total, made two All-Star teams, and got to the NBA Finals.
Exhibit B: Grant Hill. He played 47 games in a four-year span with Orlando, and went eight straight years without ever playing more than 70. In the past three seasons he's missed one game.
Sure, Ilgauskas and Hill aren't exactly the same, because they had persistent injuries to the same location (Ilguaskas's knee, Hill's ankle), rather than the wide-ranging assortment of maladies that plagued Oden.
So let me offer a better one, as Exhibit C:
Sam Bowie.
Yes, Sam Bowie. Did you know that after five injury-plagued seasons with the Blazers, he played 68, 62, 71 and 79 games in his next four seasons as a Net?
In other words, this suggests that even somebody as injury-prone as Oden has been is likely to eventually get through a few NBA seasons without incident. And when it happens, he should still be an impact player.
Do they bring him back?
With free agency approaching for Oden in 2011, Portland has two important decisions to make, both difficult.
The first is whether to make Oden a qualifying offer for one year at $8.8 million as a restricted free agent. [...]
The second question is one of price -- as in, what is Portland willing to pay Oden in the long term? Some team is likely to offer Oden a contract because of the sheer potential of what he brings if he could ever stay healthy -- the potential that made him the No. 1 pick. In a league in which Darko Milicic got multiyear, $20 million deals twice, one has to think a market for Oden remains.
Despite the Blazers' warm words, however, it's not clear to me whether that market is Portland. Oden's situation, combined with that of Roy, means the Blazers need to do some hard looking in the mirror about where they stand and what they want their future to look like.
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It's possible I'm foolishly viewing this all through Rose Garden-colored glasses, but I still think at some point Greg Oden is going to have a high-quality NBA season, and that it's possible he'll have several such seasons.
Whether those seasons will happen as a Portland Trail Blazer, however, appears to depend heavily on events that now are largely beyond his control.
