Would the Blazers take Durant over Oden if they could reverse history?

big guys always take time.. i say there's no evaluating it yet.

I think they knew Durant would be really good. But I'm willing to wait to evaluate Oden. Look at Jermaine O'Neal, among others...sometimes bigs just take time. This is Oden's 1st year. Wait on it..

 

But he's already 40 years old. How many years does he have left?

 

I don't think anyone is denying Oden has the talent and the potential to be good. The main problem is that the injuries he's had are keeping him from getting to that potential.

 

Amare, Boozer, D-Howard, Yao Ming, Garnett, Chris Bosh, Gasol and Duncan were double digit scorers in their first season. By their 2nd season, these guys were dropping 15-20 pts a night. While there have been many other bigs, who scored less than 10 pts a game.

Out of the dozens of first round big men who did poorly in their first year(late 90s and on), I can think of only David West(3-4 yrs) and Jermaine O'Neal(3-4 years).

 

The key difference is that Oden is playing on a 50+ win team, and so he's splitting minutes with another center.

Per 36 minutes, Oden is average 14.1 points and 11.4 rebounds, and 58% shooting. For perspective, in last 20 years here are the rookie centers to do average at least 14 points and 11 boards per 36 minutes (while playing at least 1000 minutes):

Code:

[B]Rk            Player  Season Age  Tm  G   MP   TRB  AST  STL  BLK   PTS  FG% [/B]
1     David Robinson 1989-90  24 SAS 82 3002  11.8  2.0  1.7  3.8  23.9 .531 
2    Alonzo Mourning 1992-93  22 CHH 78 2644  11.0  1.0  0.4  3.7  22.3 .511 
3    Shaquille ONeal 1992-93  20 ORL 81 3071  13.2  1.8  0.7  3.4  22.2 .562 
4    Arvydas Sabonis 1995-96  31 POR 73 1735  12.2  2.7  1.3  1.6  22.0 .545 
5        Vlade Divac 1989-90  21 LAL 82 1611  11.4  1.7  1.8  2.5  15.7 .499 
6    Dikembe Mutombo 1991-92  25 DEN 71 2716  11.5  2.1  0.6  2.8  15.6 .493 
7          Greg Oden 2008-09  21 POR 46 1053  11.4  1.0  0.8  1.8  14.1 .568 
8      Dwight Howard 2004-05  19 ORL 82 2670  11.1  1.0  1.0  1.8  13.2 .520 

All of them ended up being very good players.

 

You have just proven that it doesn't take several years for big men to develop. All those guys were better scorers and/or rebounders than Oden in their first year. Oden beat out Howard, a high school to nba draft pick player.

 

Actually if you adjust for pace (the Blazers play at the slowest pace -- possessions per minute -- in the league), Oden's scoring rate is slightly above that of Divac and Mutombo. Of course, neither of those players ever became 20 ppg scorers.

Again, Oden doesn't play as much for the Blazers as he would for a bad team, and he's also not scoring as much as he would for a bad team.

 

If he is having trouble with Przybilla taking away his minutes, then he is worse than Sam Bowie. Sam Bowie would have been taking minutes away from Przybilla.

 

None of the centers mentioned above, including Sam Bowie, were coming off microfracture surgery. Oden wasn't even allowed to practice 5 on 5 until September and that was after missing over one year of playing basketball entirely. Obviously you haven't seen him play much because his improvement since opening night has been incredible. Once he fully regains his athleticism and learns how to avoid dumb fouls, we'll get a better idea of how good Oden can be.

What's with the semantics on "taking minutes away"? Oden is the starter and therefore has taken minutes away from Pryzbilla. Is that good enough for you?

Of course, the bottom line is he has to stay healthy. Health will define how good Oden's career is.

 

Exactly. And so far in Oden's basketball career he's proven one thing--he's extremely injury-prone.

 

Good teams care about winning, and they'll typically play veterans more minutes and develop their young players more slowly. And Pryzbilla is a good player -- there's no shame in a rookie splitting minutes with him.

 

(I confess, I don't watch Portland at all)

Isn't he also splitting minutes, because he can't stay out of foul trouble? Out of curiosity, what would his fouls be like, if you adjusted them along with points/boards?

 

It would be 6 fouls. Foul trouble is part of it, but if the team is expecting him to play 30+ minutes a night, I think he'd scale back the fouling.

 

I thought Durant was too skinny to last in the NBA. The talent was there, without question, but his body type worried me. So far, the guy has proven me to be totally wrong. Traditionally, though, you always take the talented big over the talented wing or guard. I can't fault Portland for thinking that way. I bet they'd like a do-over, however!

 

I always thought Oden would be a Tyson Chandler-type player. Neither have much of an offensive game except for dunks and putbacks. Both are also solid rebounders and shot blockers.

 

they should've taken Durant

 

I still think Oden can hit 20-10 but looks more like he'll be a 17-13-3 guy.

I can see him winning a DPOY award if he minimizes fouls.

 

You do realize that high-volume chucker and high efficiency don't really make sense when used on the same person, right? Durant has ridiculous percentages. He's basically Dirk...but more athletic. He is like one of 3 who are putting up over 20 ppg with percentages totaling close to 180 (48.5% FG, 43.4% 3P, 86.1% FT). That is absolutely disgusting. Not to mention, he's improved his numbers almost across the board every month, to where he's now average 33.2 PPG while shooting over 50% from FG and from 3.

 

Oden couldn't even stay out of foul trouble that much at Ohio State.

He has skills, but you have to worry about his injury history.

 

It will be interestiing to see the type of player he develops into, really the choice is his. He's already rebounding at or near a pretty elite level in terms of rebound rating and stuff goes. He could focus solely on defense and rebounding and make himself into a pure defensive beast, sort of a mega-Ben Wallace, or try to develop his offensive game as well. Obviously the big question is durability.