Kevin Pritchard was the man in charge of the Portland Trailblazers when the team took Greg Oden with the #1 overall pick in the 2007 NBA Draft instead of Kevin Durant. Pritchard joined 95.5 the Game with John Canzano and discussed a wide range of topics, including that decision.

“I have never studied a person or players like I did Durant/Oden. It was every single minute of every single second of their entire careers. We were going back into AAU and the one thing that kept hitting us really hard was Greg Oden lost three games until he got to Ohio State, then he got hurt again and only lost a couple there and that was over hundreds and hundreds of games. The overwhelming thing that we got from everybody we talked to was the cat doesn’t care if he scores or does anything, but he’s about winning. We had been really trying to change our culture for guys who really put the team first, not care about stats, and really be about winning. We thought he was the pick at the time. We did the same thing with Durant. They said he’s gonna be the best scorer in the league, he’s going to be an amazing player, and he’s gonna win. We just felt like Greg was going to be that guy that just doesn’t lose basketball games. Right before he got hurt we were talking as a management group and we were like man doesn’t it feel like this is becoming a little bit like Greg’s team because in the locker room after a loss he would get really, really upset and he demands out of his teammates probably more than any other player I’ve been around other than Larry Bird. When he lost, he let his teammates knows what they have to do the next game. We were feeling so comfortable going into the rest of the second half of the season that we were going to be good because Greg was coming along.”

At the time, it was not easy to see that Durant was going to have the better career because it was impossible to know that Oden was going to have so much bad luck with injuries. Durant was definitely the better offensive player, but franchise centers don’t come around very often, and Oden was a major force on the defensive end (not unlike Dwight Howard). He also was capable on the offensive end, and already had a couple of post moves when he came out of Ohio State.

He may not be able to stay healthy, but the guy can play. His 36-minute splits over his first two seasons are impressive: 15.3 points, 11.9 rebounds, 3.4 blocks, 6.4 fouls…wait, ignore that last one. But seriously, lots of big men have trouble adjusting to NBA officiating.

Even if Oden can stay healthy, he’ll never overtake Durant in terms of overall value, but he can close the gap a bit…if he can just stay upright.

The kid can’t catch a break…

A ligament in Oden’s left knee is damaged, to the point where it will require season-ending microfracture surgery.

Friday’s microfracture procedure in Colorado will be the third season-ending surgery Oden has experienced in his four years in Portland. In September of 2007, before he had even played an NBA game, Oden had microfracture on his right knee.

When healthy, Oden has shown tremendous potential. In the seven games leading up to his injury last season, he averaged 15.6 points, 9.1 rebounds and 2.4 blocks per game, which would be borderline All-Star numbers if the Trail Blazers were a contender.

But he has only managed to play 82 games in four seasons, and appears to have chronic problems with his knees. Now that Brandon Roy is dealing with his own knee issues (he apparently has no cartilage left), one wonders what could have been had the Blazers drafted Kevin Durant instead of Oden back in 2007.

There are moments, and then there are Moments, the kind that tattoo themselves into your memory bank, making them hard to forget easily. The NBA had its share during the 2000s, certainly more that can be summed up in a few sentences.

Here’s a Top 10, confining the good and not-so-good moments to the on-court kind only that helped shape the decade.

10. Greg Oden out for the season, 2007 (and now, this one). When they drafted Greg Oden first overall in 2007, the Blazers had visions of another Bill Walton. Careful what you wish for. Oden quickly adopted Walton’s black cat and underwent microfracture surgery on his right knee. And then, just last week, he fractured his left patella. He doesn’t deserve this. Nobody does.

9. Cavaliers draft LeBron James, 2003. After a 17-win season, there wasn’t really much of a surprise what the Cavaliers would do with the first overall pick. Still, it was a major moment for the franchise, to be able to draft a local (well, Akron) and add instant buzz to a city long associated with professional sports heartbreak. LeBron made the Cavs good and Cleveland a destination. Imagine.

Read the rest after the jump.

Joe Freeman of The Oregonian wrote an interesting article that delves into Greg Oden and how he spent his summer.

There’s no question that a looser, less stressed and seemingly liberated Oden roamed the Rose Garden on Monday. So where did this transformation come from?

It all started on June 16, when assistant coach Bill Bayno arrived in Columbus, Ohio, to put Oden through a relentless and meticulous offseason workout. Four times a week, twice a day, Oden underwent a series of rigorous basketball drills designed to expand his offensive game, polish his shot-blocking and rebounding ability and improve his conditioning.

In the mornings, Bayno and Oden — sometimes with the help of former Blazer Brian Grant and Ohio State graduates now playing professionally overseas — would do drills to help improve Oden’s lateral quickness, coordination and reflexes. Some were basic, as Oden would have to block 16 shots in a row from various sides of the basket. Others were more complex, such as when Bayno would attack Oden with two-on-one and three-on-one fast breaks and require Oden to stop the ball, read passes, react quickly to snap passes and get himself in position to block shots.

The goal, Bayno says, was to help Oden rid himself of the foul trouble that plagued him last season and become more agile and more instinctive around the rim. And when defense wasn’t the focus, Bayno helped Oden work on improving his offensive repertoire, including jump hooks, baby jumpers and his face-up game.

Morning sessions lasted roughly 90 minutes and always concluded with Oden running full-court sprints and stairs. Then, in the evening, Oden would return to the gymnasium for pickup games, where he would experiment with the tools he had been working on with Bayno.

Earlier this year, I posed the question — how much better would the Blazers be had they drafted Kevin Durant instead of Greg Oden? — and the answer is that right now they’d be a lot better. Durant is a franchise player, while Oden, thus far, is an injury-prone, foul-prone center. He has a lot of work to do to justify the Blazers’ pick in 2007.

But I’m rooting for him. From everything I’ve read about Oden and on his blog, he seems like a genuinely nice, thoughtful guy. I’d love to see him reach his potential.

Check out the slide show here, and be sure to hit “i” so that the captions are on.

No one can fault the job that Portland GM Kevin Pritchard has done so far. In 2005, when he was the Blazers’ interim coach, he reportedly advised then-GM John Nash and Steve Patterson to draft Chris Paul at #3, but the duo instead decided to trade the pick and ended up with Martell Webster at #6. He was promoted to assistant GM in 2006, and was involved in a series of deals that resulted in the acquisition of the draft rights of Brandon Roy and LaMarcus Aldridge. In 2007, he was promoted to general manager. That summer, in addition to drafting Greg Oden, he turned Zach Randolph into a trade exception that he used to steal Rudy Fernandez from the Phoenix Suns.

Other than an ill-advised threat to sue anyone that tried to sign Darius Miles, it’s tough to second-guess anything that Pritchard has done in Portland.

But what if he had drafted Kevin Durant instead of Greg Oden? How much better off would the franchise be with Durant on the roster?

Look, I like Greg Oden and I’m really rooting for him to bounce back from his knee problems and go on to have the NBA career he was supposed to have. Two years ago, I advocated drafting him #1 over Durant, though it was a tough call. I was really impressed with how Oden handled his wrist injury early on at Ohio State and his dominating performance against Florida in the NCAA tournament. No one could have predicted the kind of injury trouble that the big man would have, and if he had stayed healthy, he’d probably be entrenched as a top 10 center. (By the way, as fond as Bill Simmons is of saying that he thought Durant was the pick back then, he doesn’t really pick a side in his June ’07 column.) I’m sure that after the Fernandez acquisition, Pritchard had dreams of a Roy-Fernandez-Aldridge-Oden lineup dancing in his head, so drafting a small forward wasn’t a priority. But almost three years later, it’s clear that Durant’s career is on a much higher trajectory than Oden’s.

Durant is averaging 26.0 points, 6.6 rebounds and 2.9 assists per game. He is shooting almost 49% from the field and almost 44% from long range. (The fact that he shot just 43% from the field and 29% from three-point range in his rookie season shows just how far he has come in one year.) He has the #17 PER in the league, which is the seventh-best amongst wings. And he’s been pretty durable, missing just nine games in two seasons. Not bad for a 20-year-old who’s weighing in at just 215 pounds and hasn’t yet reached his ideal weight.

Imagine building around a core of Durant, Roy and Aldridge. And with the Blazers cap flexibility, they’d have a great shot at landing Chris Bosh or Amare Stoudemire next summer. Throw in a pass-first point guard (Steve Blake?) and you’d have one of the most dangerous lineups in the West. The Blazers just blew out the Lakers the other night – imagine if they added Durant and Bosh to that lineup! Moreover, Portland owner Paul Allen (the 12th-richest American with a net worth of $16 billion) would have the dough to keep that group together as long as he wanted.

When I plug a straight Durant-for-Oden swap into the ESPN Trade Machine, it shows that the Blazers’ win total would increase by two while the Thunder’s wins would drop by five. Assuming those are for-the-rest-of-the-season numbers, that would equate to about nine additional Blazer wins over the course of the entire season. They’re projected to win 52 games at their current pace, but with Durant in the lineup that number would rise to 61. That would make the Blazers the fourth-best team in the NBA (behind the Cavs, Celtics and Lakers) and the second-best team in the West. And that’s without Bosh or Stoudemire.

What’s even more amazing is the lineup Pritchard would have if he had had his way back in 2005 and the Blazers had drafted Paul. Can you imagine a lineup of CP3, Roy, Durant and Aldridge, with the potential to add a free agent big in 2010? Granted, had Portland drafted Paul, they probably wouldn’t have been in a position to draft those other guys in subsequent years, but it’s still fun to think about.

Pritchard has justifiably built a reputation for being a genius, but if Oden can’t get his career back on track and the Blazers can’t capitalize on all that potential, then he might be remembered for the one mistake he made in his first few years on the job.

He missed the entirety of the 2007-08 season with microfracture surgery on his right knee and now he has a chipped left kneecap which has bitten a good chunk out of this season. The Trail Blazers mishandled the injury, calling it “day-to-day” when in fact it should have been labeled from the start as a potential long-term injury. Jason Quick of The Oregonian does a nice job of breaking down the timeline and Oden’s resulting frustration.

All the while, questions, both inside the Blazers locker room and in public mounted: What is going on? Is he really trying to get back? Why isn’t he playing by now?

Oden was stung by the mounting criticism. A national radio talk show called him a “lemon” and a “bust.” He thought a local columnist questioned his desire to return.

“I get portrayed wrongly, like I don’t have a heart,” Oden said. “But I sit there and I try to explain to people what is going on, and it’s like they aren’t listening to me.”

There is pain, Oden says, and not just any pain, but biting pain. He said it so many times in interviews that he started saying it more demonstratively, in hopes that his louder tone would finally get someone to believe him.

“I don’t know how else to put it: There’s a difference between sore and painful, and this is painful,” Oden said.

He says if the team pushes him to play, he will do it. He just doesn’t know how effective he would be. He can’t run as fast, he can’t jump as high and he is not as agile.

“Look, I’m tired of sitting; I want to get out there,” Oden said. “But damn, if I did go out there and play, it may be worse having me out there. They’d be playing four-on-five most of the time.”

“To this day, there’s still no real timeline,” Oden said. “It’s 7 to 10 days and then see how it feels. Yeah, well, what if the 7 to 10 days comes and it doesn’t feel good? I’m sitting here like everyone else going. ‘What the …?’ I hope one of these days I don’t feel it, but right now, I do.”

I’m really rooting for this kid. He has had a rough go of it in his first two years, but he definitely flashed some potential this season. Keep in mind that he’s just 21 and if he can ever get his knees straightened out — that’s a big IF, I know — he has the ability to become a very good starting center in this league. He’s averaging 9.0 points, 7.2 rebounds and 1.1 blocks this season and if he can get enough experience and figure out how to stay out of foul trouble, he could be a force. (His PER of 17.80 is 12th amongst centers, ahead of Al Horford, Marc Gasol and Andrew Bogut.) Moreover, he seems a like a thoughtful, worldly guy, and I’d like to see him succeed.