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LOL, Houston's trainers are like a well oiled machine when it comes to running out on the floor to a injured player. They have so much experience with this crap, they could probably hear the bone break before Oden even hit the deck.
Blazers’ Oden expected to miss rest of season
Portland center Greg Oden will likely miss the rest of the season after fracturing his left knee cap Saturday night in the Trail Blazers’ victory over the Houston Rockets.
“He’s a strong kid,” said general manager Kevin Pritchard, visibly shaken by the latest injury to befall the 7-foot center. “He’s going to bounce back from this.”
Oden dropped to the floor clutching his left knee and grimacing after colliding with a driving Aaron Brooks midway through the first quarter.
Oden was almost immediately surrounded by trainers and physicians. The crowd at the Rose Garden stood and chanted “Oden! Oden!”
The game was stopped for some 7 minutes. Finally, Oden was gently moved to a stretcher and wheeled from the court. He underwent an MRI shortly thereafter.
The Blazers said Oden will need surgery. A timetable for his return was not immediately set.
“I’m obviously disappointed having worked so hard to get to where I was. This is a setback but I’ll be back. It’s in God’s hands now,” Oden said in a statement released by the team. “I want to thank the fans, my teammates and everyone in the Blazers family for all of their good thoughts.”
Oden, the No. 1 pick in the 2007 NBA draft out of Ohio State, has been plagued by injures his entire NBA career.
The 7-footer missed rookie season after undergoing microfracture surgery on his right knee. Last season, Oden sat out six games after injuring his right foot in the season opener against the Lakers, then missed 14 games after the All-Star break with a bone chip in his left knee. He finished the season averaging 8.9 points and 7 rebounds.
Oden lost weight during the offseason and was averaging 11.7 points and 8.8 rebounds this season as a starter.
“I thought he was the most consistent player this short season,” coach Nate McMillan said. “For him to go through this—it’s just unfortunate for him because he worked so hard.”
Blazers guard Brandon Roy said Oden spoke to the team at halftime, after he had learned of the diagnosis.
“He told us to keep fighting,” Roy said. “He feels like he’s letting us down.”
Portland went on to edge the Rockets 90-89, snapping a three-game losing streak. But Oden’s injury felt like a “punch in the gut,” Pritchard said.
The Blazers have been beset by injuries. Starting forward Nicolas Batum needed shoulder surgery just before the opener. Fellow forward Travis Outlaw fractured his foot in mid-November and required surgery.
Forward Rudy Fernandez was out of Saturday night’s game with sciatic pain and set to undergo an MRI. It was uncertain if he would be with the team on an upcoming four-game trip starting with the Knicks on Monday night.
Even McMillan was set to undergo surgery Monday after rupturing his right Achilles’ tendon during practice.
The coach was participating in practice because the team is so short-handed. He will miss the team’s upcoming road trip, replaced by assistant coach Dean Demopoulos.
LOL
That's true, Houston has some horrible luck with injuries too, they're always 1 top guy away..
McGrady, Cook and Scola's reactions are telling too..
It did, last year.
LOL
I guess he forgot.
Livingston was an extreme case. He messed up almost all parts of the knee.
- Dislocated patella
- Torn ACL
- Torn PCL
- Torn Lateral miniscus (like Bynum last year I think)
- Sprained MCL
Multiple knee injuries resulting in his leg bending laterally.
Thankfully, I think Oden is just a fracture from what I've read.
I'm pretty sure Bynum had a tear of the MCL last year.
I seriously feel bad for the guy.....((
Get well!
so
in 3 seasons
Oden has played a total of about 40 games out of 246 games
Everybody feels sorry for this guy, but, when Bynum gets hurt it's a lot of snickers & guffaws. What a hoot.
Oden should just retire. Screw even trying to come back. He should take what money he has and walk away. Buy some real estate and spend the rest of his life on a beach somewhere.
Even if he makes it back, is there any doubt that he'd just get jacked up again. In short order.
It does make you wonder how Portland is going to salvage this. How much is he currently costing them?
Greg Oden is just brittle.. the old man started in high school when he had to have surgery on his wrist.
There but by the grace of God almighty goes each of our boys.
Bynum is severely knock kneed and at precarious risk for catastrophe.
Where to now for Portland?
By John Hollinger
PORTLAND -- It was perhaps the ultimate irony: On a night where the Blazers wore their retro uniforms from the 1970s, their star center fell to a season-ending injury. As it was with Bill Walton and Sam Bowie, so it goes with Greg Oden. The Blazers' big man suffered his second season-ending knee injury in three pro seasons, fracturing his left patella in the first quarter of the Blazers' 90-89 win over Houston tonight.
Yet it was another retro -- back to the halcyon days of 2008-09 -- that may be the ultimate takeaway from tonight’s game, and it leads me to a significant silver lining in this cloud.
More on that in a minute, but first let’s get to the main story. Yes, we can officially say Greg Oden is injury-prone. By the end of this year, Oden will have played 82 of a possible 246 games since Portland took him with the first overall pick in 2007. While broken bones are rarely career-altering, this injury is franchise-altering in the sense that it seems a pipe dream for the Blazers to count on Oden going forward. They can take his contributions as gravy if he’s healthy, but they can’t build a team around him.
His latest setback appeared to happen without any contact: He planted both feet to block a shot by a driving Aaron Brooks, and his left knee simply gave way as he went up. Brooks lofted in a bank shot while Oden grimaced and began to clutch his knee while still in mid-air. Photographs in the immediate aftermath showed his kneecap displaced several inches down and to the right from where one normally expects a kneecap to reside.
All this seems horribly unfair to Oden, a gentle giant who, as general manager Kevin Pritchard somberly noted afterward, had worked so hard to come back from his first knee injury. Oden felt bad enough that Brandon Roy said, "He looked at me and he was like, 'Sorry,' and put his head down." He also was asking for score updates while being carted off for his MRI.
In a roundabout way, it's unfair to Pritchard too. I know what you’re all thinking, so before we go any further: All you second-guessers out there, just stop it. All 30 NBA general managers were prepared to take Greg Oden over Kevin Durant. All of them. There wasn't even any question about it. One can fairly ask whether this consensus was borne more of the hope that infects every personnel evaluator upon seeing a talented 7-footer than of common sense. That said, it's hard to single out a front office for doing what everybody else would have done too.
A more salient point is how Oden's injury puts the rest of Portland's season in a much different light. As Blazers coach Nate McMillan noted, Oden had been the team’s most consistent performer in what had otherwise been a largely disappointing season for Portland.
“This is a setback,” stated Pritchard, and it’s one that leaves him running low on players. With Travis Outlaw slated to miss most of the year with broken foot, Nicolas Batum still out, and Rudy Fernandez (sciatic pain) the second-most prominent addition to the injury list tonight, a Blazers team that began the year wondering how to allot minutes among so many talented players suddenly finds itself playing with a skeleton crew.
Little-used subs like Jerryd Bayless, Dante Cunningham and Juwan Howard all saw extensive action on Saturday night. With rookies Paddy Mills and Jeff Pendergraph also hurt and the maximum 15 players under contract, the Blazers will have only nine healthy players until Fernandez comes back (he had an MRI Saturday night and the results were not available).
Pritchard dryly noted that the league doesn’t allow injury exemptions until a team is down to seven healthy players, and that he wasn’t rooting for two more injuries. But he admitted it may be time to look at roster moves to bring in reinforcements.
A trade is one possibility, especially one that uses the expiring contract of Outlaw. Another is to cut Mills and sign a “stretch 4” from among the league’s waiver-wire flotsam, since that spot is the most glaring roster need at the moment.
But in a weird way, Oden's injury takes some of the heat off a Blazer team that was visibly pressing, and off a front office that may have felt pressured to do something rash. Expectations bred by last year's 54-win season had caught up with this team, and with Oden's injury they can get back to relaxing and playing basketball without feeling like they need to win every game by 20 points.
They could also get back to playing a similar style to a year ago, when Joel Przybilla started at center and Oden came off the bench. I mentioned to Roy that tonight’s game was the first one of this year that felt like last season's games, and he didn’t disagree. McMillan made similar comments in his postgame press conference, admiring his team’s cohesiveness and scrappiness in rallying to beat the Rockets.
For whatever reason, the guards had a much easier time than in other Blazer games this season. Andre Miller -- the official scapegoat of the 2009-10 Blazers -- had his best game in a Portland uniform with a season-high 24 points, leading a third-quarter rally that got Portland back in the game, while Bayless needed only six shots to score 13.
Roy also seemed more comfortable with the added driving lanes created by not having Oden in the post. Tonight he scored 28 points on just 15 shots, the first time he'd scored more than 20 points while making at least half his shots in nearly a month and only the fourth all season. Three times in the last minute he scored on the type of 1-4 isolations plays that he killed opponents with last season, including the game-winner with 3.0 seconds left.
I’m not sure this just a coincidence. If one looks at the results of the Blazers’ five-man units a year ago, the starters tended to play much better with Przybilla, and the subs much better with Oden. While much of the focus has been on Roy’s inability to pair with Miller in the backcourt, it appears that attention may have been misplaced and glossed over a bigger story -- the inability of either of them to play with Oden. This isn’t a knock on Oden, as McMillan was correct in noting how well he’s played. But the pieces don’t fit together smoothly, at least yet.
Because of that, I don’t think this injury is the death knell that some suspect. Oden was playing extremely well, but if Roy and Miller revert to their long-term averages in his absence, it will offset the loss.
That said, the Blazers face a difficult road to the postseason now, something that seemed all but assured at the start of the season. Their once-formidable depth now is more a liability than strength, with the frontcourt in particular looking thin. For instance, when they signed Juwan Howard this summer I don’t think the idea was for him to be the first big off the bench.
Oddly enough, then, Oden’s is a franchise-altering injury, but I’m not sure it’s a season-altering one. Tonight’s game leaves me with the sneaking su ion that Portland will continue more or less on its previous trajectory toward a low playoff seed. That would have been a huge disappointment with a healthy Oden; it now will likely be seen as a pleasant surprise.
Welcome to our world Blazerfans.
Nice and warm and cozy bent put on by Hollinger. The clarity is just adorable.
F'k him.
You can't help but feel sorry for the poor guy. He's a talented and sensitve kid, who wants desparately to live up to the expectations placed on him. This really sucks for him.
Portland's history with big men, who were drafted number one overall draft, isn't exactly warm-n-fuzzy:
LaRue Martin - (1972 -1976)
Bill Walton - (1974 -1978) - Won 1978 NBA Championship
Sam Bowie - (1984 -1989)
Greg Oden - (2007 - )
Could there actually be some validity to the rumored "Portland Big Man Curse"?
No sympathy on my part. That's what happens when you're a senior citizen.
Stupid that knee pads are considered not cool, or for whatever stupid reason players with a history of knee injuries don't wear them.
Could a knee brace have avoided this injury? I really feel bad for Oden.
Damn... Poor SOB...Oden felt bad enough that Brandon Roy said, "He looked at me and he was like, 'Sorry,' and put his head down." He also was asking for score updates while being carted off for his MRI.
sabonis was fine. he just was here past his prime
& those little ties.^
I never thought oden was all that
he has always been injury prone
he could not even stay healthy in colledge
what makes people think he could in nba amazes me
oh and how many games has durant missed blazer fans
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