Up until 11:41 p.m. on Saturday night, the big news this week was Allen Iverson and his re-debut in Philadelphia -- talk about the return of the Prodigal Son -- to try to make right what he helped make so very, very wrong by the time he left town. No one has ever played a bigger role in his own demise than AI, but what makes his story so compelling is that he knows it, and does better by inches, then falls back. Nobody is more self-aware than Allen. It's the stuff of a novel.
(Here's Art Garcia's interesting take on AI's comeback.)
Then there was also Kobe's ridiculous game-winner on Friday to beat Miami -- a shot that, in his own words, was the luckiest one he's ever made. Another week in the Association.
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But then came Saturday, in Portland, the news bad from minute one, and only getting worse:
Greg Oden goes down in the first quarter against Houston.
Oden stays down. For seven minutes.
Oden is carried off the court on a stretcher.
Then comes that awful waiting, when you play out the hundred or so scenarios in your head, praying that things aren't as bad as you think.
And then, finally, comes 11:41 p.m., and a text from Cheri Hanson, the Blazers' VP of Communications, whom I've known for 20-plus years and is the gold standard in public relations people. Saturday was her night off, but nobody needed to tell her she had to come to the Rose Garden when Oden went down. It's the family business; Cheri's dad, Bob White, was the Blazers' original PR guy, and she's done it with distinction everywhere she's been. She doesn't suffer fools -- especially when they are her own players or coaches -- and she is as straight a shooter as you will find. Anyway, the text:
MRI confirms Portland C Greg Oden fractured left patella. Will undergo surgery to repair. Likely out for the season.
Man, sometimes this league makes you cry.
You want Sam Bowie jokes this morning, go read somebody else. You want to hear how the Blazers blew it by taking Oden instead of Kevin Durant in 2007? The world is filled with people who always knew what the right choice was after the fact, when it wasn't their butt on the line. It's easy to say now that you knew Durant was going to be a star (Simmons was on Durant early; I guess he can crow if he wants), and it's easy to say in a vacuum, when you don't have to consider anything else -- like, for instance, would Durant and Brandon Roy be any more successful sharing the ball than Roy and Oden were this season?
No matter what you think of Oden, you have to acknowledge how effective he'd been the first month of the season, shooting better than 60 percent from the floor, leading the Blazers in rebounds and blocked shots, becoming a legitimate post presence.
"God, he was playing so good," Blazers general manager Kevin Pritchard said Sunday night. "He was playing so good."
It's not that the Blazers were setting the world on fire. Frankly, they were floundering. Andre Miller, Pritchard's big free-agent signee last summer, has run hot and cold, as Nate McMillan tried to figure out the best way to use him alongside Roy. The Blazers benched Miller, then used him in a three-guard lineup, then went back to two. Roy didn't have the ball in his hands as much as Oden established himself inside, and Miller dribbled the ball outside. But Pritchard believed that everyone would get in sync.
"Brandon is an unbelievable kid," Pritchard said. "He had his anxietites because he wanted to live up to the contract (a five-year extension that kicks in next season) and he wanted to be successful. He wanted to be an All-Star and live up to everything we ask him to do. With Oden and Brandon, I had no worries. I knew eventually they would get it. They're both good kids. They're both unselfish. They both have different anxieties, no doubt about it. Brandon was as prepared to be an NBA player as anybody I've been around. But he still has growth as a leader. He knows it. I was around Tim Duncan when he was growing up, and he had to go through it. There were some tough times. He's an amazing leader now. But he didn't wake up and all of a sudden he was the leader of that team."
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Sam Forencich/NBAE via Getty Images
It's been a horrible, horrible few months for the Blazers. Their owner, Paul Allen, disclosed last month that he is again battling cancer, 20 years after first being diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease. Maurice Lucas, the team's assistant coach and former enforcer at power forward, is in a second bout with bladder cancer. The guy who was supposed to start at small forward, Nicholas Batum, is out until March following shoulder surgery on the eve of the regular season; the guy who was supposed to replace him, Travis Outlaw, is also out until March after foot surgery.
Rookie Jeff Pendergraph is dinged up; Rudy Fernandez is on the shelf this week with back spasms; McMillan, the head coach, is undergoing an operation Monday after rupturing his Achilles' tendon in practice last Friday. (Assistant coach Dean Demopoulos will run the team in McMillan's absence during the Blazers' eastern road trip that begins Monday in New York.)
Now comes this, with Oden, another season-ending injury. He underwent successful surgery Sunday afternoon, but will add 61 more games to his butcher's block. At the end of this, his third season in the league, Odom will have played exactly one full season's worth of games -- 82 -- out of a possible 246, having missed all of the 2007-08 season after undergoing microfracture surgery on his right knee. Last year, a right foot sprain and a bone chip in that same kneecap cost him 20 more. (Pritchard told local reporters on a conference call Sunday that doctors ruled out any connection between that injury and this one; this was a freak "explosion" injury in which Oden didn't bang into anybody; he was just jumping.)
Pritchard didn't sleep much Saturday night; an hour or so, maybe. Sunday he spent at a local hospital with Oden, during and after the surgery. Then he went to another hospital where Lucas is laid up. Then he tried to help work out the details for Oden's mother, Zoe, to get to Portland Sunday night to be with her son. (Oden's father, Greg, Sr., will join his son in Portland soon as well.) Then he had the conference call with the local reporters.
Pritchard kept up the positive talk Sunday. Part of it was because Oden seemed much more accepting of his fate this time than in '07, when he apologized to everyone within earshot again and again after finding out he needed knee surgery. Saturday, he was initially down, but then, he got his wind and vowed to be back.
"My job is to feel everybody and feel their pain and understand that there is a legitimate issue, but we're also going to fight," he said. "We're going to fight for them and we still have a lot of pride, and we're going to be OK. We still have a heck of a player in Brandon Roy, and a really good player in LaMarcus Aldridge."
But part of Oden's optimism comes from the support system the Blazers put in place for him -- a better one, they admit, than they had two years ago. And one of the biggest keys to that support system is what makes this latest setback so intriguing.
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