I gotta say that I don’t envy Greg Oden. You have been the biggest thing since sliced bread since high school, get picked #1 in the NBA draft, and are immediately expected to be the missing piece to what looks to be a very talented roster in Portland along with All-Star Brandon Roy, PF Lamarcus Aldridge, a slew of talented young guys including Rudy Fernandez, Martell Webster, and Travis Outlaw. Then in your first NBA game you go down and are out for the season. I gotta say I just don’t envy the guy.
It’s much to early to call Oden a bust, he does have a LOT of talent.
As many jokes are cracked, no matter how he looks he is only 20 years old. He is still figuring out who he is and to make it worse he has to watch all his faults picked at every night on ESPN. I would liken him in disposition to Tim Duncan and I am not saying 4 years at OSU wouldn’t have done him a lot of good but you can’t change things. He is not a guard like Lebron or CP3 who has great ball handling skills and create shots for himself, so it is unfair to compare him to those other young guys. To be the savior of a team immediately via the center position is very hard to pull off. Not since Shaq has a center been so hyped coming out of college. The problem is that Greg Oden is not Shaq, but he is no Kwame Brown either. He is tremendously more talented than Kwame ever was and in the end could be as talented as Shaq but he is missing the one thing that Shaq came into the league with and has always had, swag. I am talking about Shaq’s confidence, his mean streak, his ability to get in a mindset that he was taking over the game and no one could stop him. I suppose that its that killer instinct that they always talk about, Magic, Jordan, Bird, Miller and Kobe they all have it and right now in his career Oden doesn’t have that. Now there is nothing to say he won’t develop it though.
I mean Oden didn’t come out and say I am coming to take over the league, I am going to be the greatest center to ever play, no he didn’t say but the media did. Now that same media and those same analyst are rushing to call him a bust, to say that he body doesn’t seem like it will hold up and what not. I just think its comical, I mean he has the same body he had in college albeit with a little more muscle these days but they weren’t talking about his durability then, they were just in awe of his potential.
Just let the kid play.
The funny thing about potential is that it takes time to fulfill it. Right now Oden is on a team that is already pretty good and to be a better team they don’t need him to be Shaq, they just need him to be solid in the middle on defense, grab some rebounds, and block some shots. I mean really 15 ppg, 9.o rpg, 2 bpg would suffice. After he has played a couple full seasons in the NBA, then we can judge but until then back off the kid.
