Trail Blazers take step toward keeping Oden

The Trail Blazers will reportedly extend Greg Oden the required one-year, $8.8 million qualifying offer to give them the right to match any offer he may receive elsewhere. (John W. McDonough/SI)

When you’ve commit this many hours and this much heartache to the development of a 7-footer you drafted with a No. 1 overall pick, it’s probably worth it to extend the relationship another year — especially when your team is going to be capped out anyway. And so Marc Spears of Yahoo! reports the Trail Blazers will extend Greg Oden the required one-year, $8.8 million qualifying offer to keep him a restricted free agent and retain their right to match any competing offer for Oden. The Blazers themselves haven’t confirmed the offer yet. 

If that offer does come, it’s important to remember it would represent just the start of the process. Rival teams can make those competing offers, and the Blazers can offer Oden a bunch of alternative contracts in addition to the one-year, $8.8 million deal Spears says will soon be on the table. Perhaps the Blazers could convince Oden to sign a longer deal, for two or three seasons, with a lower annual salary, a lower percentage of guaranteed money and a pile of incentive clauses. 

The Blazers waited quite a while to take this step, even if Spears reports they told Oden’s people earlier this week they would indeed take it. You can understand why this would give Portland pause. Oden has had microfracture surgery on both his knees and played in just 25 percent of Portland’s regular-season games since arriving in the league. He is already the first No. 1 pick since Kwame Brown to not receive a contract extension before this point. And the Trail Blazers have a roster that is both crowded and somewhat lacking in guys whom Nate McMillan can count on for big minutes. If they bring back both Oden and Patrick Mills (questionable), they’ll have 13 players guaranteed money for next season, according to ShamSports. Among those 13 players would be: Brandon Roy, Marcus Camby, Mills, Oden, Armon Johnson, Elliot Williams, Luke Babbitt and Nolan Smith, Portland’s first-round pick this year. Those eight players comprise an enormous amount of uncertainty, health issues and extreme inexperience. 

Even with all these bodies, this team could easily be pretty thin, and giving a roster spot to a guy with a long recovery timetable and a catastrophic injury history adds even more uncertainty to the picture. 

But this is Greg Oden, and given all the Blazers have put into this, it’s probably worth pursuing him with either a one-year deal at this salary level or a short deal at a lower rate that won’t kill their cap picture, which clears up just a bit after next season when deals for Camby and Raymond Felton expire. (It could clear up a lot more if the new collective bargaining agreement contains the right kind of amnesty clause and Paul Allen, Portland’s owner, is willing to pay Roy the balance of his deal in order to waive him. But that’s a topic for another day.) 

And for what it’s worth, over 21 games in 2009-10 Oden put up a Player Efficiency Rating that would have fallen right between those of Dirk Nowitzki and Paul Gasol this past season. He improved his finishing and free-throw shooting, and he showed himself to be the rebounding monster and game-changing defender we all thought he could be. That player is a difference-maker, and probably worth a short-term deal, even if he may sit on the bench for the duration of it. The Blazers have just shy of $70 million in salary committed next season before any money for Oden is included, so it’s not as if the Blazers would sacrifice a chance to pounce in free agency by tossing a few more million Oden’s way.