Try to argue all you want, but there were a majority of Celtics fans who were hoping the ping pong balls would bounce the right way and the C’s would end up with Oden in the 2007 draft. At the time, he was the consensus No. 1. Instead, however, the balls bounced a different way, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Oden, on the other hand, ended up in Portland. It’s turned into a marriage that has yet to work out at all for either party. The latest bad news came a couple of weeks ago, when it was announced that the former Ohio State big man would need microfracture knee surgery and will miss the rest of the season.
It’s just the latest of injuries in a career laden with setbacks. In the three seasons since being drafted in 2007, Oden has played the equivalence of one NBA season — 82 games.
All the while, the Celtics won a championship and the 2007 No. 2 pick, Kevin Durant, has quickly evolved into one of the game’s elite players.
Oden’s troubles are just the latest in a long line of problems for Portland big men. Any conversation of Portland big men starts with Sam Bowie. The No. 2 overall pick in the 1984 draft will live forever in basketball history as the guy who was taken before Michael Jordan. Bowie played a decade in the league with three different teams and never averaged more than 16 points per game in a season and never pulled down more than 10.1 rebounds per contest in a season.
Even Bill Walton, another No. 1 pick of the Blazers suffered a myriad of injuries in his first couple of seasons before leading the Blazers to a title and turning into an NBA legend.
Are Blazers big men cursed? Leave your thoughts below.
