Is it the medical staff in Portland, who should have been taking better care of him? Is it his coaches or trainers at Ohio State, or in high school, or even earlier, who misused him and put undue wear and tear on his young legs? Maybe, perchance, is it Oden himself?
Maybe it's not that simple. Maybe you have to dig a little deeper to find the true answer.
Maybe it's fate.
Put it this way: There is no position in all of sports more cursed than Blazers center. None. You can track this going back over 30 years — it's a disturbing trend of injuries, draft busts and endless "what if?" questions. Greg Oden isn't a health concern — he's a sign from above that something in the Pacific Northwest has continued to go very, very wrong.
Let's start in the mid-1970s. Bill Walton, one of the biggest stars ever to play for John Wooden at UCLA, made a name for himself as the first overall pick in the 1974 NBA Draft. He was hailed as the savior of the Blazers franchise. With Walton leading the way, Maurice Lucas helping out and Dr. Jack Ramsay running the show from the sidelines, the world was expecting to see a basketball dynasty emerge in Portland. The Blazers won one title — in 1977, beating Philadelphia in six behind an unforgettable performance from Walton — and then things fell apart.
Walton broke his foot in 1978. He missed a big chunk of the season, tried to come back in the playoffs, and only ended up hurting himself more. The Blazers got pummeled by an inferior Seattle team in the Western semis, and Walton never played in Portland again. Walton went on to become a Hall of Famer, but he was still only a shadow of what he could have been. He was the ultimate passer, the ultimate defender, the ultimate franchise big man in every way. If you could measure basketball IQ, Walton would be Mozart, Einstein and Da Vinci all rolled into one. But things never really worked out for Walton in Portland.
Then you have Sam Bowie. Has there ever been a basketball player more famous simply for being picked where he was in the draft? Bowie's claim to fame is being selected No. 2 overall by the Blazers in the 1984 draft — after the Rockets' Hakeem Olajuwon, and before a kid named Michael Jordan. Bowie had been a superstar at Kentucky in the early 1980s, and he went on to have a fairly productive NBA career — over 10 seasons, he averaged 10.9 points and 7.5 rebounds a game — but no one would ever remember Bowie for anything but the fact that he wasn't MJ.
How about Arvydas Sabonis? You probably remember the name. He was the starting center in Portland for nearly a decade. Between 1995 and 2003, he was the Blazers' main big man, even taking them on a couple of deep playoff runs around the turn of the century. But what you might not know is that Sabonis didn't enter the NBA at all until 1995, when he was already past 30.
He was picked by Portland with the No. 24 pick in the 1986 draft, and the Blazers at the time had visions of him as the next Walton, a franchise big man who could take them back to the promised land. And when he outplayed David Robinson at the '88 Summer Olympics to capture a gold medal for the Soviet Union, the speculation only grew greater that Sabonis was going to be something special. But because of Sabonis' celebrity and the political turmoil between the Soviets and Americans in the late '80s, Sabonis was barred by government officials from coming over to the States to play basketball. He never got a chance to prove himself in the NBA until he was past his prime.
And now, we have Oden.
Since losing their starting center, the Blazers have collapsed. They've lost three of their last four since Oden was carried off on a stretcher during their Dec. 5 game against Houston, and they now sit at 14-11, in third place in the Northwest Divison and fading fast from the Western playoff picture.
On paper, especially with the Blazers' roster, it's hard to believe. But in the history books, knowing what these Blazers have been through, it's hard not to.
There's a long line of Blazers big men who have tried — and failed — to achieve greatness in Portland. Anyone who appreciates great talent and great promise was rooting for Oden to buck that trend. But so far, it's been three seasons, and that just isn't happening.
You want to say there's still hope for Greg Oden. You really do. But hope is hard to come by in southwest Oregon — and it's getting harder every year. The Blazers are a franchise that's unmistakably, habitually, perhaps even supernaturally, hopeless.
