Here you go, MIXUM. Enjoy. http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/steve_duin/index.ssf/2010/10/greg_oden_oregon_or_bust_but_i.html
Thanks for the link, e_blazer, and this is NOT aimed at you, but is it me or is that column totally unnecessary? It's like Duin is trolling in the Oregonian. Or is a very bitter fella. Ed O.
Something must be in the water at the Oregonian, because Quick's article comes off the same way Duins does. As an angry ex, who is mad that you've moved on and is totally being irrational and emotional. My guess is they're taking a page from the Canzano handbook. Actually, scratch that. If I wanted to read crap like this, I'd go to hoopsworld, or hoopshype, or some other bafoons blog. Or read posts here.
I agree with everything that Duin wrote outside of his Oden rant, which I do understand but don't accept. We are small-time, we have small-time leadership, and instead of improving roads we build bike lanes. Instead of allowing a tribe to set up a casino with a quid pro quo of funding a MLB ballpark, we renovate PGE Park 8 years ago for millions of taxpayer funds, and take out another public loan to revamp the same stadium for "Major League" Soccer, which is really AA or AAA baseball in equivalence to European football. Young American players and washed up overseas veterans instead of the Oakland A's. Duin hit that one right. Portland is small-time, and its leaders have small-time ambition.
I maintain that a player cannot be considered a true bust until his career is over. Also, people like Duin and Mixum only post this stuff to get attention. Controversy sells.
I had the same thought, Ed. It seems as though Duin wanted to rant about Portlanders being willing to settle for less than the best and, for no real reason, decided to tie that to Greg. Yeah, Greg would get tougher treatment in a bigger city, but is the fact that, by and large, folks here are a bit more patient than big city fans something that we should feel embarassed about? I'm more than willing to call Greg's first 3 years a bust due to injuries, but I'm also patient enough to think that he may well prove the nay sayers wrong in the long run.
I always love how people say that "there's so much more to do in big cities" than there is here (which is why the attendance #'s are as good as they are, etc), as if there's nothing to do in Portland/Oregon/SW Washington. What, did we just get phone service 5 years ago or something? The region has parks, several mountains near by, a the desert, the ocean, hiking, biking, and Portland even has movie theaters. I guess you could say Portland doesn't have amusement parks, but how often do people really visit those? Sure, Portland/Oregon has no other sports teams (of note), but I'm not so sure the Venn diagram of sports fans are that big. I think it's just people who have a strange desire to make fun of the area, even more so than what the average Oregonian/SW Washingtonian thinks of the area (poor government, stupid backward thinking in that regard).
Is Greg Oden supposed to have mind control powers over his bones? Is he supposed to brag about how great he is going to be and promise us 12 championships in the next 12 years? He isn't a bust, he just isn't. I sure hope the people who talk shit like this about him are few and far between because if they aren't, I hope GO goes to New York and doesn't say a word and dominates the league for the next ten years. He can if his injuries are just a bad string of luck.
Holy shit, that's the most brutal article I've ever read. Not even Damon, Zach, Bonzi got these kind of 'write up's'. The Blazers will always get roasted over the Oden/Durant draft but this article seems so unnecessary. I'm pretty sure he's not getting injured on purpose. However, I do agree with ONE point he made in this article:
why you shouldn't let a Metro section columnist whose two previous books were about Comic Books and Fatherhood talk you into paying him to write a sports column. Makes Bleacher Report and Hoopshype look like the Encyclopedia Brittanica. 1) Microfracture is about cartilage. Not bones. 2) "Salary demands"? Uh, it's a slotted spot. Portland knew exactly how much they were going to shell out before the pick was made. Don't know how Greg's "Salary Demands" fall into that. As for Duin's question: Since I'm not a Metro columnist, I'll attempt to use facts and stats. 1. Greg Oden is still on the Blazers' roster. Even if he was cut, chances are high that another team would take a shot to sign him. You can't be a 'washout', imho, if you haven't actually washed out of the league yet. 2. Fiasco. Aside from injuries and the sext photo, has there been an issue with anything he's done? Even in the middle of what could be described (if you wanted) as a raging alcohol problem from a 19-21 y/o man, there wasn't a single incident that could be called a "fiasco". Are injuries a "fiasco"? How long did the "fiasco" with Eddy Curry last in that hotbed of criticism, NYC? How long did Isiah Thomas last there? How long did that bastion of criticism, Philly, take to call Allen Iverson a bust for all of his off-the-court stuff. Wait, they didn't? Who knew? 3. Flop. The enlightened members of this board have already been through all of this, but there are just a couple of points I'd like to make. In the games he's played, he's had one year of 18 PER and one of 23. He's been rebounding at an All-Time Great rate, and he's been playing defense at an average rating of 101. If you'd like to say "it's time to cut bait with this guy, because for whatever reason he's played in 1/3 of his games", that's almost a defensible opinion. Duin's opinion that it's up to Greg to show that he's NOT a "fiasco, washout, flop" is indefensible on all three counts, and seems to me as overhyped trolling to a mass audience.
That article pretty much makes me never want to read another article by him again. It brings up GO then bashes him(pretty much like you expect as he is calling GO a bust) but then it goes on to bash all of Oregon. This guy seems pissed he has a job here and doesn't have the money to move to a big city and is stuck here so all he wants to do is vent about how much it sucks.
He's trying to be a populist, the "angry fan being brutally honest" tirade. The problem is, when there's nothing to actually be outraged over and the writing is so poor, it just sounds like a buffoon venting. Try another gimmick, Duin. Or actually work on learning to write insightful analysis. One or the other.
That was a steaming pile of shit. Oh and not that mediocre shit you would find in "OREGON"(air quotes for emphasis).
Not buying this. In my opinion, Kwame is a bust, even if his career is not over. It is pretty clear that he is, at best, a bench guy. IMHO a player can not be considered a true bust until it is clear that he never plays again or that he will never be really good. We are not there with Greg. When he did play, he was fantastic - but we are not sure if he can or can not stay healthy. He is not clearly a bust, but there is a chance he will become one.
This, of course, was way over the top. Duin's purpose wasn't to go after Oden. It was to go after all Oregonians, using Oden as an example. Here's how the paper should put light pressure on management (not Oden): Cho: Oden says he won't play by Christmas, past the 1-year mark of his operation. But we're hoping he'll miss, oh, maybe 5 games. It's week to week when he'll stop feeling occasional pain. He has good days and bad. He may be back next week, next month, who knows. Oregonian followup question, per usual: Thanks, we'll print that without comment! Oregonian followup question, how I'd like it: He recovered from the operation in normal time, 8 weeks. The problem is his strange abnormal recovery time from the ensuing inconsistent pain, not from the cartilage healing. Since tens of millions of revenue dollars are close to being lost during his career, is the team spending any money on bringing in new thinking? For example, let's hear from the top doctors in the country who have opposing views as to how hard to push him. Some might say that practicing 3 on 3 before the pain totally ends would hasten the end of the inconsistent pain. Or maybe fund a few million dollars on pain research, trying new post-operative remedies on volunteers who have this injury. (Even long-term solutions like a 2-year study would pay off in plenty of time, since we're going to have this pained guy around for 10 more years.) Are you trying any new thinking? Are you doing anything other than biding your time, accepting failure? Since his contract will end soon with no change in his health, have you determined the maximum you'll be willing to pay for the status quo? Or is everything, manana man, wait till tomorrow?
IIRC, he used to be the Oregonian's sports columnist (Canzano type), but was transferred (canned) to whichever side of the newspaper he currently reports to.
