Griffin, Oden, and Yao: Why Not All NBA Injuries Are Created Equal

The Los Angeles Clippers announced today something we’d been afraid of for months: Blake Griffin, the much-ballyhooed number one pick in the 2009 draft, was undergoing season-ending surgery. He is now the second top pick in three years to miss his entire rookie year due to injury, and has re-awakened talk of the Clippers as a cursed franchise.

Griffin is the latest star big man to go down in the NBA, joining the Lakers’ Pau Gasol, the Blazers’ Greg Oden and Joel Przybilla (still a little broken up about that, personally), and the Rockets’ Yao Ming, who suffered his injury in last year’s playoffs.

Blake Griffin's injury is devastating for the Clippers - but not in the way you might think.

Losing an inside presence like Griffin is a blow to any franchise, yet each of these teams has responded to the loss very differently. Obviously, each team’s response depends a lot on who they have on the bench (having Lamar Odom as your backup is a lot different than having, say, Juwan Howard), but the amount the team relies on the player is even more important, and not in the way you’d think.

You would expect that teams that rely heavily on their star big men would be devastated when they go down. That was the conventional wisdom concerning the Rockets in the preseason and the Blazers following the Oden and Przybilla apocalypse. Yet both of those teams, after struggling initially, have flourished without their centers.

Portland has a record of 24-16, while Houston has a record of 22-17, good for sixth and seventh in the brutal Western Conference. That with Juwan Howard and Chuck Hayes starting at center. What gives?

Meanwhile, teams that rely a little less on their big men have seen the opposite result. Pau Gasol has missed more than a few games for the Lakers this year, but no one would call Gasol L.A.’s MVP. (That’s not to say he isn’t good, but let’s face it – when teams draw up game plans against the Lakers, they aren’t focusing on Gasol, they’re focusing on Kobe.) Boston’s Kevin Garnett has been missing from action as well, and while he’s arguably the emotional core of the Celtics, offensively speaking, he might be the team’s fourth-most important player, behind Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, and Rajon Rondo.

Both of those teams are still doing well for themselves, but they’ve been a lot worse without their big men.

So what’s the deal? Why would losing a less-prominent player actually be worse for a team than losing a superstar? And what does this mean for the Clippers?

Here’s the deal, or my thought, anyway – when you lose a superstar, you know exactly what you’re missing. If the Orlando Magic, for instance, were to lose Dwight Howard, they know they’d be missing a 20-10 every night, as well as some terrifying defense. Do you think there’s any chance they’d play the exact same way as they do now if Marcin Gortat were starting at center?

Of course not. They’d retool their game, and while it certainly wouldn’t be as effective as before, they’d find a way to make it work. They’d have to.

Meanwhile, if you lose a role player, or even a rotation player, it’s not quite as clear what’s being taken away from your team. More often than not, you think that you can play the same way you did before and make do with your backups. It tends not to work as well as you’d hope.

Don’t believe me? Think about the motivation in each case. When a role player (even someone as high-profile as Gasol or Garnett) goes out, the team is still more or less in the same place as it was before. It’s sort of like pulling out a couple of blocks in a tower. It still looks the same, even if it’s somewhat structurally weaker.

Have you seen this man?

Meanwhile, if you lose your superstar, that’s like kicking your whole tower over. You don’t have a choice but to rebuild from the ground up. You’re motivated by desperation, instead of inconvenience.

This year’s Blazers provide an interesting example, actually. Backup power forward Travis Outlaw was the first in the cavalcade of injuries for Portland, but at the time, his loss didn’t appear to be too serious. Team leaders Brandon Roy, LaMarcus Aldridge, and Oden could certainly pick up the slack.

Or, at least so they thought. Without Outlaw to worry about, opponents could focus more on shutting down the big three, and the Blazers started dropping more games than usual.

However, once Oden and Przybilla went down, the team had to dramatically shift the way they played. Instead of a slow, grinding, halfcourt offense, they became a gritty smallball team, scrapping out win after win.

Which brings us back to Griffin. What can the Clippers expect now that he’s gone?

It’s hard to tell, considering he never ended up playing a game for L.A. this season, but it’s safe to say he probably would have fallen more on the role player side than the superstar side. His potential is through the roof, but there’s little reason to think that he could have realized it all this season.

Losing a role player means that the team tends to fall into its old habits, and that’s more or less what we’ve seen from the Clippers this season. They’ve played about the same as they did last year, and while they’ve won more games than last year, they still aren’t a particularly intimidating team.

Clearly, the Clippers would prefer not to have any injuries at all. But if they could do it all over again, they might actually be better off losing Baron Davis or Chris Kaman rather than Griffin.