The harsh truth of the NBA is that only one team out of 30 can win a championship in any given season. Those that do and do it repeatedly get immortalized, as do the stars that led them, but there are plenty of good teams that can’t quite cross the hurdle. Plenty of great teams have failed to deliver a title, and while there are always a lot of reasons for that, perhaps the hardest one for them to stomach is injuries.
And perhaps no team has been afflicted by injury as bad as the Portland Trail Blazers were during the 2009-10 and 2010-11 seasons. Greg Oden is infamous in NBA history as the man picked ahead of Kevin Durant, but in the 09-10 season, he still had some promise in him. The Blazers team in 2010 also boasted Brandon Roy, who was an All-Star, along with Andre Miller and a young LaMarcus Aldridge.
On paper, they looked set to be excellent, but in reality, injuries destroyed both Roy and Oden, and that team lost in the first round in multiple seasons. Andre Miller addressed the 2009-10 season in a recent interview, talking about how they could have made a run if not for injuries.
“Now that I think about it, that team, health-wise, if we would have stayed healthy, we could have played with any team in the league. All the way possibly to, if everybody’s healthy, to possibly make a Conference Finals run. I even forgot to mention LaMarcus Aldridge. That guy’s a Hall Of Famer, so it was a lot of talent, man. It’s just the injuries that were there.”
Roy was forced to retire thanks to injury after just 3 All-Star seasons, while Oden barely played in the league after 09-10 thanks to his injuries as well. It’s fun to think about what might have been with this team, but they will be consigned to history as a permanent ‘what if’, showing that luck is also necessary to become the greatest.
