But still, it was nice that he took the time to talk about a few things.

I mean the guy is pretty busy, I’m sure he has other things he needs to get done other than watch 2 hours of turnovers and foul calls. Sure it would have been nice of him to take some time and check out his new team mates but I wouldn’t take it as him not caring or anything like that.

They’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other in training camp and pre-season.

He said he had not talked to anybody on the team since the end of the season. That interview really makes me feel bad.

for basketball like Bird, Jordan, Kobe and others had/have. That was one of my worries about drafting him over Durant. But still, this was just no-count summer league play.

What bugged me more than this, was that he didn’t seem to follow the team around last year all that much on road trips like it was stated he was going to do. He did that super long one I believe, but missed others. But he was rehabbing, which I’m sure was much better facilitated right there in Portland (and he was very diligent about that rehabbing). You know one of the things that bothered me the most, was his lack of enthusiasm when sitting on the bench watching while his OSU teammates played in the NCAA tournament.

Everyone likes Greg because of how laid back he is. It’s hard to have both Kobe’s driven passion and Greg’s easy going, fun personality. Fortunately, he’s supremely talented and given good health he should still contribute a ton to the team, with or without that inextinguishable fire. Just a guess, but I think the NBA season will be very long for him.

Summer league is kind of a pain to watch. I’m sure not even Jerryd’s parents watched his games at SL.

Doesn’t bother me one iota. Considering his schedule, that would have been a complete waste of his time. The only basketball I want him to watch on TV right now would be Pete Newell big man instructional videos (if they even exist).

There is a small part of me that feels a bit bugged, but you got to look at the whole body of work. Perhaps this is a gross way of oversimplying what Ben wrote, but it seems like the perception people are having with this is that….... Greg Oden didn’t watch summer league and hasn’t been in contact with his teammates, therefore Greg Oden must not care.

Greg Oden cares a lot. He may not eat, sleep, or die every tiny aspect of Blazermania yet, but he cares. Apologizing for an injury shows he cares. The kind of rehab he has been doing really shows he cares. Do I need to mention Rasheed and Darius in the same sentence when comparing them to Oden’s work ethic?

Greg said he hadn’t talked to his teammates. That is kind of sad. I’d like to see him be more proactive in staying in touch with them. On the otherhand, it is fair to point out that perhaps some of his other teammates with phones should give him a ring as well. It is a two way street.

He is a 20 year old kid who looks 40 who we seem to think should act like he’s 30. He’ll show his true colors in the not too distant future.

You must have taken the sensitive pill or else its just that time of the month for you. Seriously, summer league? He doesn’t have time for that , and when he’s done lifting, marketing, promoting, pumping, practicing, training and rehabbing, I have no doubt the last thing he thinks about is his teammates or their summer league play. He probably meets up w/ old buddies, hangs w/ his girlfriend or watchs movies while wrestling w/ charles barkley mclovin. Although i voted that it bugs me, i changed my mind after I started to think. RELAX buddy, you are a G that doesn’t mean you have to loke up on everyone anytime something is not exactly right!

Sophia

that he wasn’t even the little bit curious about Bayless. The national media couldn’t shut up about his play in SL so you’d have to be under a pretty big rock not to know what’s going on. Since he’s your teammate, don’t you think you’d tune in for at least a quarter or two?

it was the total absence of ANY Blazer player. I didn’t expect any to come and watch every game, but I thought someone should have made an appearance. Chris Paul was there and I don’t know who all else. Same way with the Rookie-Soph game or All-Star Game. I saw Blaze, but no players. You’da thought that somebody might have wanted a quick trip to Las Vegas…

It sure wasn’t his best interview, so I’m not going to take it TOO seriously. But I gotta say I was surprised that he wasn’t curious about “the new guy” and I sure wish he’d mentioned that he’d talked to Brandon or LaMarcus or SOMEBODY.

nothing to get emotional about

Henry Abbott of TrueHoop decided he would rather have Durant than Oden: Durant lives and breathes basketball and thinks nonstop about dominating on the court; Greg Oden is a more-or-less regular kid who happens to be 7 feet tall and can play some hoop. I’m not even inferring this, Abbott actually mentioned this in his blog last summer during the GO/Kevin Durant Apocalypse debate.

So, to me, this is the price of having Oden: He’s got stuff in his world outside of Basketball, and he’s already thinking about his life after basketball, at all of 19 years old. He approaches the NBA like most of us look at our job: things we do for a living between doing things we’d rather be doing.

It’s so nice when we have a off season where the big debate about a Blazer player is only whether he should of watched a few summer league games. How can I worry about this? I can’t! Come on! Gregs a young guy, he spent far more time this past season only “watching” basketball. So he’s busy being Greg. No…sorry not an issue. He’s got a whole lot of time to get to know Bayless. Infact if he’s going to be playing with him it might be better that he doesn’t watch the summer league games. I think Bayless in the N.B.A. is going to be asked to play with more focus and a different role with different expectations. If he had said something like he didn’t even know who we drafted? Well then we might have a problem, but admiting to not sitting down to watch what really are exhibition training games? Greg’s a player, not a coach. Sorry I vote relax. Relax, remember summers past? This is NOT a problem.

i havent been able to read through the replies so i apologize if i rewrite a point.

But Greg at the very least should have watched the Summer League Games. I think he shoulda been there in person to watch.

He is a busy guy, but he is still a rookie, and an aggresively hyped one at that, he needs to be familiar with Monty as a coach, coaching Bayless and Batum, and he should be hungry to see the rookies coming in.

Maybe I’m off base, but Greg needs to start watching his mouth a little in interviews. He is a praised individual in the sports world, but I’d like for him to start earning the right to make crazy statements.

The kid has yet another cold. It seems he gets a cold a month. I want someone to tell him that he has to wash his hands many, many times a day. He’d get far fewer colds if he would just wash his hands. He probably shakes hands with people a hundred times a day. Yeah, I’m sort of anal (can I say that/) about hand washing but it really, really helps to minimize the spread of disease.

That would bug me! 82 games, plus training camp, plus pre-season, plus playoffs…..Man that’s a grind, no matter how you look at it. Some guys just don’t eat sleep and drink the game 24-7 and G.O appears to be one of those guys.

chill a little. Perhaps you are too close to the Blazers, if something like this bothers you. For all the reasons mentioned above, this is easily one of the most non non-issues ever discussed here.

Imagine you are on summer break and somebody is criticizing you for not having been to the University bookstore to buy next semester’s text books and not having already read the first three chapters in each. You’d probably turn Sophia loose on them.

Furthermore, reading ahead in your textbooks has some value. Watching a summer league game has little, if any. Besides, as Mort points out, how do you know if the games were even available to him? It’s my understanding that Portland was one of the few cities where fans could watch the games. I wasn’t able to up here in Seattle.

What is one of the things we’ve loved about Oden? His honesty, and humor during interviews. During the first year as a Blazer he was one of the best interviews in sports (IMHO). The guys was such a crack up. He shot from the hip and came across intelligent, personable, and funny.

Over analyzing what he says will force him to push all of that inside himself and he’ll become the interview clone we all hate. When member’s of the media (such as Ben with this piece, and old man Conzano falling of his rocker because of a 10% difference in how Oden’s knee felt) go Freudien on Oden and start questioning everything he says Oden will eventually start saying things like “It was a good game. Both teams played hard.”

Is this really what we want? It’s off season, news is a little slow with SL done. Do we really need to go so in depth on a guy?

As an example I have a friend who lives in Tigard. I haven’t talked to him in probably a month, maybe two. Does that mean we’re not really good friends? Is our friendship at an end? Can John and Marsha ever get back together? No. I’ve known this guys since the second grade which is slightly more then twenty years ago. We consider each other brothers. He was one of my “five equally best men” at my wedding. I’ll very likely see him again soon. Our friendship does not depend on nightly phone calls.

To close I guess I’m saying that if we want Greg to feel free to just talk during an interview we must allow him to do so without scrutinizing every detail. Greg has proven in every way I can think of that he loves basketball, and that he is passionate about it. Also his want to complete his education shows a maturity that is rare. Lets all remember what we have here. The kid wanted to play so badly he even played at 24 hr fitness.

Everyone take a collective deep breath…. and relax.

/end rant

I didn’t bother to watch a single summer league game, either. I’m busy, but I bet nowhere near as busy as GO.

So, no. If this is the worst thing Oden will do this summer, then my gosh, we better trade him now.

Yes, I’m being facetious.

during the regular season, and they all decide to go out to eat together, that’s good enough for me. They can’t all be in a fishing hole in Mississippi. Chemistry won’t be an issue. Let the man have his stinkin’ off-season and worry about game-time, they will be ready. They are all coming back early again from what Nate said, isn’t that enough?

but if he missed the Blazer Dancer auditions, I’ll be so disappointed with the big man.

GO will have plenty of time to get to know JB’s game during camp and in the preseason. I just hope that next summer he won’t have to rehab any injuries so he’ll be able to dis-attach from NBA concerns even further and just relax. When I’m on vacation, I don’t care one whit whether I missed some “all important” conference meeting where the newest employees were introduced. I’ll have plenty of time to get aquainted when I get back.

anything bad or that he is reading too much into this as some of you are suggesting. He’s just wondering if this otherwise innocuous act of omission could possibly be indicating Greg’s passion level for the game. That’s not an unreasonable thought. We’ll know more in 82 games.

that Greg not watching SL games bugs any of you. How many of us live and breathe our jobs, hobbies, spouse, kids, etc. 24/7 to the exclusion of everything and everyone else in our life? Ben, I appreciate your blogger’s honesty about your fan feelings, but having that reaction would make me wonder if my perspective is skewed.

If Greg were to read these comments, I imagine he’d wonder if there’s just no way to please Blazer fans…

Chuck Norris Doesn’t

than GO not watching SL

You have to kind of wonder if the kid is a little too caught up in the sideshow of being a well-known NBA player, but on the other hand he’s really young and he was forced to sit out a year with a busted knee. I’d probably be bored too.

Too early to say if this is a red flag, let’s see what happens once he’s actually played a season.

Keep in mind that Greg Oden, just because he is under contract to play for our beloved team, might not share our enthusiasm for it (or Barrett and Rice’s, for that matter)—indeed, he might never feel the way we do. That might sound odd; let me make myself clear: a Blazer player might never be a Blazer fan, and it’s pretty clear Greg isn’t a fan like we are. I know Greg has mentioned on his blog that he intends to “bring back the glory days,” but you hear similar sorts of promises whenever, say, one of the tanking American car manufacturers gets a new CEO or CFO who promises to get every American back behind the wheel of a Ford. They don’t say such things because they “love” their company. They’re paid to do a job they enjoy and are good at. Of course Greg wants to help the team win. Does that mean he’s infected with Blazermania? Well, I don’t think so. He’s paid to do something he loves, and he wants to succeed.

You may recall Bill Walton’s comments around the time the Celtics picked him up. Sure, we associate him with a lot of the good things Blazermania represents for us…particularly winning a championship, selfless gameplay, a countercultural, progressive attitude…but I don’t believe he won the championship for the city of Portland or its fans or anyone in particular. And once he got to Boston he said, “The Celtics were always MY team.” That may well be a lot of “oh, gee, thanks” baloney after he signed the Boston contract, but I’ll take him at his word—Bill Walton was a Celtic fan. Maybe he wishes he’d gotten Boston a championship instead of Portland. Yet he loved winning games, no matter where he was, and he was under contract. Thank goodness he played for us!

Remember Walton calling Blazer games against the Shaq Lakers? He was as far from being a Blazer homer as I can imagine. At my young age I resented him for it. Now I can understand. The NBA gives us this illusion that our team’s players are playing for “us”. Nonsense. They’re getting paid to entertain. And who are “we”, really? I met a guy in Chicago the other day who said he was a lifelong Blazer fan. He’d never set foot west of the Rockies. In my gut I felt he was wrong. But why? Walton fancied himself a Celtics fan, way out in San Diego. How ridiculous.

Anyway - back to Oden, in the light of these comments - if I were making buckets of cash, sitting out with an injury, going back to my home state to take some some cool summer classes and jet around the country for the ESPYs and a few interviews - and if I were twenty years old - of course I wouldn’t watch the Summer League. A bunch of sloppy basketball from rookies and a few dozen fourth-stringers? No thanks. You say some guy from Arizona’s scoring lots of points? All right, I’ll wait for the regular season before comment. Until then I’ll be out for a nice bike ride. Shoot, I’d be lining up for Batman and working out and doing some homework and catching up with my mom on Sunday afternoon.

Then again…if I were Oden, and if I were genuinely a fan of the team, of course I’d watch the Summer League. I wouldn’t miss a second of it. I’d trace the bitterness behind Snapper’s commentary. I’d downplay Bayless’s turnovers and zero assists. I’d pooh-pooh comments about Koponen being a “better Steve Blake”. Basically I’d do the same things we do every day at BE and all over the web. But that’s not Oden: he’s not a fan. In fact, I bet he gets a little sick of the NBA altogether - the media, the hype, the fans, maybe even the game itself. I’m guessing I’d get sick of it, too, if I were in the same position. People value him only for his basketball talent. People insult him, saying he looks old or sounds stupid - but when he dunks, we love him. What a crock. People were oddly surprised to see him singing and playing piano. Forget basketball. We haven’t begun to discover what a remarkable young man he is…and here we go again insulting him because he didn’t wait up for the Bayless Show? Ease up, people.

Now, for people getting upset that Oden and Roy and LMA don’t call each other up over the summer—we can’t just assume they’re best buddies. First and foremost they are co-workers. How often do you call up the people at work and say, “Hey, let’s go hang out over the weekend?” I mean, really. Sure, Oden and the others might become friends after a while, but who knows if they are right now? Just because they’re on the same team, we can’t assume they hang out after work.

I really felt nauseous listening to that interview. Poor Greg Oden. Replace “Blazers” with “Coca-Cola” and you’ll see what I mean. In fact sometimes I worry that’s all it is; we’re cheering for a brand name. “Oh, Greg, aren’t you excited to work for Coke? Our clients can’t wait to see you out there selling lots of Coke. When are you coming back to work? You know, a couple of our other sales associates, they’re doing great this summer on behalf of Coke! What do you think about that? Don’t you love Coke? Don’t you Greg? Don’t you?”

Maybe GO really watched the games but was too ashamed to admit it.

Greg could be either unwilling or incapable of possessing that single minded obsession with the game most of us would like to see. That being true, he will never be quite as good as he could be although he has so much talent he should still be a special player.