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Kevin Durant calls Greg Oden's self-diagnosed 'bust' status 'nonsense'
Kevin Durant characterizes Greg Oden’s re-telling of himself as “the biggest bust in NBA history” as absolute “nonsense,” as most of us did when Oden discussed his personal measure of his NBA career in a discussion on ESPN’s ‘Outside the Lines’ recently.
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Appearing on the same show, Durant chimed in with the rest of us in pointing out that Oden had all-NBA and potential Hall of Fame talent to begin with, prior to injuries felling what could have been a legendary career.
Why does Durant’s voice stick out? For one, he’s Kevin Durant: 2013-14 NBA MVP and member of the Golden State Warriors. Secondly, the man was second. Taken No. 2 in the 2007 NBA draft, directly after Oden was selected top overall by the Portland Trail Blazers.
As such, his voice deserves a little more amplification:
“Nonsense. That’s nonsense,” Durant adamantly told ESPN on Sunday night. “In order for you to be a bust, you have to actually play and show people that you progressed as a player. He didn’t get a chance to.”
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“He didn’t want to get hurt. That was the last thing he wanted to do was to get hurt,” Durant told ESPN. “That wasn’t even in the cards, and he got injured and that was unfortunate. But when he did play, he was a force. Protecting the paint. They were so good with him and LaMarcus down low, with Brandon Roy [and] Andre Miller at the time. They had a nice team. So he was a big part of that.
“He’s not a bust. He just didn’t play a long time because of injuries, and that’s just what it is.”
You’ll recall that Oden qualified his take on bust-dom by pointing out that the perception of him “would only get worse as Kevin Durant continues doing big things.”
This allows for the outsized comparisons, and eventual too-strong swipe in regard to the summation of Oden’s too-short career. The center, who averaged eight points, six rebounds and a block per game in 105 career contests for Portland and Miami, would have had a lot easier go of things had his draft slot been followed by any choice amongst the No. 2 overall draft picks that followed the 2007 process: Michael Beasley, Hasheem Thabeet, Evan Turner or Derrick Williams.
Instead, Durant came directly after Greg. The Texas product was understandably picked by most that June to be the NBA’s 2007-08 Rookie of the Year due to his pro-ready game, his ability to put up strong stats, Oden’s limitations as a center, and Durant’s placement on a Seattle SuperSonics team that would deal Ray Allen on that draft night, prior to waving goodbye to scoring forward Rashard Lewis a week after the draft.
Those early projections weren’t a dig at Oden, merely recognition of what Durant had going for him in his first season on a gutted Seattle team. Just about every analyst at the time – don’t let them tell you any differently – had Oden pegged as the rightful top overall pick, and the eventual best player in the 2007 NBA draft.
The Durant expectations came a little easier a few weeks after the draft, when it was revealed that Oden would miss his entire would-be rookie year after undergoing microfracture surgery. From there, Durant’s ascension was only matched by Oden’s frustrating fall: Kevin would be a 20, 25 and 30-point (league’s top) scorer in his first three seasons, while Oden would work just 82 total games over the same stretch of time.
During that stretch, however, Oden famously piled up averages of 15.3 points, 11.9 rebounds and 2.3 blocks per 36 minutes of play for a Portland team that rarely drew up any plays for him. He was very, very good. If a little coltish, as you’d be after attempting to cram an entire NBA career’s worth of potential into short bursts of playing time, after sitting out for so long.
Durant points out that in spite of (or, perhaps, in no small part because of) their disparate careers he and Oden are “always going to be linked together” due to their “draft class,” and the fact that they were amongst the first in what was then a rare “two freshmen [going] back-to-back 1 and 2 picks”-scenario. The fact that both went to teams located in the Pacific Northwest, and their dueling “dominant center” (which, make no mistake, Oden was) and “seemingly effortless scorer” archetypes only played into the pairing.
Greg Oden is not a bust. He was a great and potentially NBA-dominant basketball player that was hit with a series of career-crippling leg injuries. That isn’t to say that there haven’t been legitimate busts before, at the top overall pick.
LaRue Martin was selected by a skinflint Trail Blazers front office in 1972, mainly because he outplayed Jim Chones and then Bill Walton in nationally-televised games a few months before. Anthony Bennett was selected top overall in 2013 because of an abject lack of leadership in the Cleveland front office. Michael Olowokandi was taken tops because teams (both in and out of the lottery, like that year’s Chicago Bulls) wanted to overlook his motivational shortcomings on the way toward fawning over his physical gifts. Kwame Brown developed a lasting NBA career, but not before he was taken ahead of several far, far better players due to a few magical weeks of workouts prior to the draft in 2001.
The general managers behind those selections were busts. This wasn’t the case in Portland.
Greg Oden was selected tops overall in the 2007 NBA draft because he was supposed to be. Kevin Durant, of all people, understands that.
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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
