Greg Oden era sadly might be over before it started

Five years ago this week, Ohio State was on its way to the Final Four. In the third week of February, the Buckeyes were ranked first in one poll and second in another, and five weeks after that, they were playing Florida in the national championship game.

Greg Oden got them to the top of the rankings and got them to the final game. On that night in the Georgia Dome, in a loss that was much closer than the nine-point margin, the 7-foot freshman from Indianapolis faced the Gators’ Joakim Noah and Al Horford—and hit them with 25 points, 12 rebounds and four blocked shots. He was so good, the Florida players and coaches, in the middle of celebrating back-to-back titles, paused to congratulate and console him as he walked downcast from the court.

That was two days after Oden took on Georgetown’s Roy Hibbert and Jeff Green and sent them home.

You pretty much knew that Noah, Horford, Hibbert and Green would reconvene in the NBA soon. As it turned out, the Florida freshman pulled off the bench to take a stab at slowing Oden down, Marreese Speights, also made the league.

But nothing was more obvious that night than this: Oden was the future.

He was 19 years old and, infamously, had that old-man face and old-man moves, but young-man legs and spring and reach and instincts. There was nothing about playing center in the NBA that he couldn’t do, including get better, stronger, more mature.

And, within a couple of months of that Final Four breakout, richer. Greg Oden was a sure thing.

He was talented and developed beyond his years, the kind of center they don’t make anymore, not in college or the NBA. Not that there had been any doubts about whether his drive matched his ability ... but he did enormous damage to his opponents, including shooting free throws, with his left hand, having developed his off-hand after surgery on his right wrist in high school.

He also was entertaining and engaging, with a deadpan, self-deprecating humor that could be milked by the NBA and endorsers as creatively as Blake Griffin’s would be a few years later.

The two teams that eventually drew the lucky ping-pong balls and got the first and second overall draft picks, Portland and (at the time) Seattle, were not so downtrodden that it would take forever to build around Oden and re-emerge as powers. In terms of fevered anticipation, that Oden-Kevin Durant lottery is in the pantheon with the ones that included Patrick Ewing, Tim Duncan and LeBron James. No less than the Boston Celtics tanked that season trying to get one of those first two picks.

There was pretty good resistance to Durant, the national player of the year, having to settle for No. 2, of course. Oden was going to be great, but Durant might end up greater. Of course, conventional wisdom was going to win that debate. When in doubt, go big, especially if it’s once-in-a-generation big.

Oden was that kind of big. The Final Four sealed the deal.

That was one of the more loaded quartets in recent years, two No. 1 seeds and two No. 2 seeds, four teams that entered the dance in the top eight of the AP poll. Each program had previously won a national title, still a rarity. It also doubled as a de facto NBA combine.

Besides the aforementioned Gators and Hoyas, two of Oden’s teammates are in the NBA now, Mike Conley and Daequan Cook. So is one other foe from that final, Corey Brewer. On the UCLA team that Florida beat in the other semifinal? Only four future NBA players—Arron Afflalo, Darren Collison, Luc Mbah a Moute and some freshman guard who played eight minutes in that game, Russell Westbrook.

That’s 13 current NBA players sharing one court on one weekend; two, Hibbert and Westbrook, will be in the All-Star Game Sunday in Orlando. Oden was head and shoulders, left and right hands, beard and premature wrinkles above them all.

It was going to be Oden’s league, and Oden’s world.

As long as, you know, he stayed healthy. That’s the obligatory mention, because you just never know what might happen.

On Monday, Oden underwent microfracture surgery on his left knee, for the second time on that knee and the third time overall. It was the fourth knee operation of his NBA career. Now 24, Oden has played 82 NBA games and will not play any in this, his fifth season.

Everybody was sure they were seeing the future that April night in 2007. This is not the future anybody saw.