The NBA was a different league in 2007.
Over 10 years later, no draft prospect with the statistical resumé and mouth-watering physical traits of Kevin Durant would be taken behind a seven-footer with limited skill and a checkered injury history. But hindsight makes it easy to forget that Greg Oden was the consensus top player in the 2007 draft, as much for his years-long reputation as a generational prospect as his outstanding freshman season at Ohio State.
If he'd maintained a clean bill of health, Oden very likely would have lived up to the billing of being the No. 1 pick. That the Portland Trail Blazers would still regret picking him over Durant, though, seems pretty obvious, especially because the two-time reigning Finals MVP, he eventually realized, would have been excited to play in the Rose City.
“It would've been cool to be No. 1, play there in Portland, the black-and-red jerseys. It just seemed like it was right,” Durant said recently in an interview for The Players' Tribune. “After a while, I was more so…Everybody else was telling me, like, ‘You should think about being No. 1 pick, you should, you know, want that.' I'm just like, ‘Yo, we just hoopin'.' You know what I mean?
“But it is cool to see David Stern come out and you the first guy taken. After [Oden] was chosen, I'm like, ‘Damn, that s*** does probably feel good to him.' You know? I ain't realize that until after he got drafted. And it's just like, ‘Man, that s*** probably probably feels good, but we both still in the league so let's just go hoop.”
Durant was selected with the No. 2 overall pick by the Seattle Supersonics, who moved to Oklahoma City and re-branded as the Thunder after his rookie season.
Oden, beset by a series of injuries, sat out his rookie season to get healthy before flashing the potential that made him the No. 1 pick in 2008-09 and the first 21 games of 2009-10 before suffering a fractured left patella, an injury from which he never fully recovered. After three years out of the league, Oden last appeared in 2013-14 as a late-season addition of the Miami Heat.
The Blazers have a depressing history of significant injuries to foundational players, beginning with Bill Walton in the late 1970s, but most infamously marked by Sam Bowie – the big man they took one pick before Michael Jordan in the 1984 NBA draft.
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