The Night Greg Oden was The Best Player in Basketball

Before injuries derailed an NBA career that never really began, Greg Oden delivered a dazzling performance in a National Championship Game loss.

With the Florida Gators returning to college basketball’s National Championship Game for the first time since winning repeat championships in 2006 and 2007, I originally began this newsletter intending to spotlight those UF teams.

Billy Donovan’s back-to-back title winners reached the mountaintop twice with remarkably deep and, perhaps most importantly, uniquely unselfish rosters. To wit, no one on the 2006-07 Gators lineup averaged more than 13.3 points per game — Taurean Green, Al Horford, and Corey Brewer all put up 13.3 or 13.2, and any of the three certainly could have put up more elsewhere.

But they also wouldn’t have enjoyed the success or made the impact as one of only three repeat championship winners in the modern era of the NCAA Tournament.

With all that said, the collective excellence of those Florida teams more or less seems well understood still today. Perhaps less appreciated is that the best player on the court when the Gators completed their repeat has the unfortunate distinction of being remembered mostly as a bust.

Greg Oden concluded his lone season at Ohio State with 25 points on 10-of-15 shooting from the floor, fearlessly going right at Joakim Noah. Noah was college basketball’s best interior defender at the time, and the NBA Defensive Player of the Year in 2014.

Oden also grabbed 12 rebounds and blocked four shots. Oden’s was the best National Championship Game performance in a loss I had watched since Syracuse’s John Wallace vs. Kentucky in 1996, and Oden’s is still the best since 2007 to today.

Hakeem Olajuwon is still the last recipient of the NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player who didn’t also win the national championship, but Greg Oden had a hell of a case in 2007.

His title-round performance capped a postseason with three double-doubles and two more games coming one board shy of double-doubles. He shot 55.2 percent from the floor, averaged 16.2 points and 9.2 rebounds, and blocked 2.2 shots over the course of Ohio State’s first (and still only) National Championship Game run since the 1960-1962 Buckeyes played in three straight title rounds.

Oden’s National Championship performance also provided an emphatic closing statement in the season-long debate playing out in basketball media pitting Oden against Kevin Durant.

Greg Oden’s story is inexorably linked to Kevin Durant’s for countless basketball fans who tuned into the sport in the 2000s. Having followed a multitude of NBA draft debates in my time following basketball, few ever felt as acrimonious in nature as Oden vs. Durant — and not for anything to do with either player.

I pin this responsibly on Bill Simmons, whose prominent voice and reversal of positions on Oden in particular shaped much of the narrative surrounding the Ohio State big man’s career.

Without turning this newsletter into a Sports Guy diss track, here’s some necessary background to establish my point: Simmons was inarguably the most influential sportswriter of the 2000s. Whether that’s a positive or negative is a matter of personal taste, but subjectively, his word carried cachet that colored public opinion like few others in the space have ever been able to — especially on matters of pro basketball.

Personally, I was never a Bill Simmons fan for reasons I won’t get entirely into here beyond the scope of the Oden-Durant conversation. For one thing, as a dyed-in-the-wool NBA guy, he seemed to force himself into the college basketball space during the 2006-07 season not with curiosity but with an authoritative and oftentimes condescending air about his coverage.

The Sports Guy’s brief flirtation with college basketball media centered largely on Durant, who had an otherworldly season at Texas. Durant swept National Player of the Year awards with averages of 25.8 points, 11.1 rebounds, and 1.9 blocks per game, and there was no question he deserved the accolades.

Oden was excellent for Ohio State, leading the Big Ten in rebounding at 9.6 per game, blocks with 3.3, and field-goal percentage at 61.6. But as far as the numbers voters often look to when determining individual honors, Durant was the clear choice.

Less clear at the time was which prospect would be the better NBA fit.

It’s ironic in hindsight, and the shift may be a direct result of Oden vs. Durant specifically, but Oden’s old-school presence was arguably a better fit for the NBA at the time.

In 2007, Shaquille O’Neal was only two years removed from an MVP-caliber season in Miami. The San Antonio Spurs won their second NBA Finals in three seasons with all-time low- to high-post great Tim Duncan as their pillar, and the Detroit Pistons nearly won back-to-back championships with defense- and rebounding-specialist Ben Wallace as arguably their best player.

Greg Oden had the makeup to be a rebounding and defensive force like Wallace. Perhaps he would be the type of All-Star big man that Dwight Howard was growing into with Orlando at the same time, 2007 marking his first of eight career All-Star appearances.

And, if the stars aligned just right, maybe Greg Oden could take over the mantle from Tim Duncan as the preeminent post player in basketball; someone who combined old-school principles of crashing the boards and scoring around the basket while developing enough of a face-up game to become a matchup nightmare.

Viewing Oden’s qualities and potential exclusively, without Durant involved in the discussion at all, the Buckeyes' big man had everything that made GMs salivate in that era of basketball’s style of play.

The style happened to change, and Kevin Durant played a key part in that. Durant’s ascent to all-time NBA greatness doesn’t exactly make it easier to relitigate Greg Oden’s college career, either.

But let’s revisit the thoughts from Oden’s most ardent detractor in 2007, immediately following the National Championship Game, shall we?

In an ESPN Page 2 column titled “Greg Oden: No. 1 with a bullet,” Bill Simmons wrote:

Greg Oden was awesome. He was the best player on the court. He kept OSU in the game by himself. And I turned off the TV thinking two things.

1. Greg Oden is the No. 1 pick in the draft. The debate is over. He pulled a Private Ryan and earned that spot.

2. After watching Thad Matta butcher that game (not resting Oden, not using his timeouts, not pounding the ball inside enough, not doing anything to control the pace of that game) to the point that Oden nearly keeled over in the final three minutes, we might need to re-evaluate whether Matta and his teammates were holding Oden back to some degree. (Note: Matta did a nice job in the Georgetown game but was BRUTAL on Monday night. You can't expect a guy who's been battling foul trouble all season to suddenly give you 38 end-to-end minutes against a rotating group of future NBA big men.) How would Oden look playing in an offense that was built around him? We'll have to wait until next season to find out.

I'm just happy we have a definitive Oden college game to remember, highlighted by the surreal two-handed stuff of Brewer in the first half that CBS refused to replay for whatever reason. He was a beast. He was a man among boys. Florida won, but so did Greg Oden.

The above touches on important caveats that apply to any NBA prospect, most notably organizations working with talented youngsters to cultivate offenses built around their strengths. While Durant’s skill set ensures he would have become a star wherever he landed barring catastrophic injury, his immediate and meteoric NBA rise got a considerable boost landing with the Seattle Supersonics.

Longtime Oklahoma City Thunder GM Sam Presti stepped into that role in 2007. The terrific book Sam Anderson book “Boom Town,” on the history of Oklahoma City, examines Presti’s visionary approach to constructing rosters. Building the franchise around a college power forward moved to the perimeter bucked trends in ways no one really had to that point.

It’s worth noting that even stretch fours of the 2000s still mixed it up in the paint. Kevin Garnett might face up, but he was ultimately scrapping near the rim. Dirk Nowitzki, the 2007 MVP, helped reimagine the role of 7-footers with his 3-point shooting — and even then, attempted only 2.2 beyond the arc per game that season, 0.4 fewer than Durant shot for Seattle in 2007-08.

Had Durant landed somewhere that expected him to play stretch-four, the position he manned for Texas, instead of moving the 7-footer to an ostensibly shooting-guard role, a variety of questions arise: Foremost is, would he have remained healthy?

Injuries have shortened so many promising careers and fundamentally altered others. Grant Hill might well have been the face of the NBA at the turn of the millennium without his injuries. A Houston Rockets frontcourt that was growing into a dominant force with Olajuwon paired alongside Ralph Sampson may well have denied the Chicago Bulls their monopoly of the Larry O’Brien Trophy with Michael Jordan.

Bill Walton was an MVP almost immediately into his pro career before the injury problems that remain the foundation for Portland fans’ laments of being a cursed franchise; a curse that prominently includes Greg Oden’s litany of injuries that prevented his NBA career from ever starting in any meaningful way.

You have be a real jerk to spike the ball over injuries — unrelated but, lookit this! Here’s a Bill Simmons column for ESPN The Magazine in November 2008 titled “I hate being wrong. Except when it’s about Greg Oden.”

Nevertheless, Oden not making in the NBA proved validating for some. But for 40 minutes in Atlanta in 2007, Greg Oden was healthy and he was the best basketball player in the world when facing off with one of the greatest teams of all-time.