By the Numbers: Could Greg Oden Be As Good As Kevin Durant?

I’m going to start this article by saying something completely safe and non-controversial.

Kevin Durant is a fantastic player and has a ceiling as high or higher than anyone else in the league.

Now brace yourself, because I’m about to say something irrational and borderline crazy.

Greg Oden, the guy picked ahead of Durant, could be just as good or better.

Take a moment to get all of your screaming out. I’m an idiot, right? There’s no way a player who has played all of 82 games in three seasons is anywhere in the same ballpark as a player who is rewriting record books and has already made an All-Star Game. Right?

I don’t blame you for thinking that way. Frankly, I think Durant is the better player of the two. And he has one big thing going for him that Oden doesn’t – his knees are still in one piece, and he’s only missed ten games over the course of his pro career instead of the 162 Oden will have missed by the end of this season.

But just for a moment, let’s set aside the elephant in the room. Let’s just focus on their production on the court. In just his third season, Durant is putting up all-world numbers in Oklahoma City. But what’s less publicized is that Oden wasn’t doing too bad in Portland, either. Let’s take a look at a spider graph (for those unfamiliar with the concept, take a look at this article first) and compare the two of them:

As you can see, Durant’s area is larger, but Oden’s isn’t too shabby. Durant comes up with more points, assists, and steals, and you’d expect that. He’s a wing, and his primary focus is on offense. Oden wins with field goal percentage, rebounds, and blocks, which also doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Oden’s been viewed as mostly a defensive specialist (a la Ben Wallace), and so you’d expect him to dominate in the defensive statistics.

Here’s where it gets tricky, though. Durant’s clearly the more impressive player based on these statistics, but there’s one more thing we have to take into account. So far this year, Durant has averaged just under 40 minutes a game. Oden? Before his catastrophic injury, he was averaging just under 24. Essentially, that means every night, Durant has twice as long to run his numbers up, so the fact that Oden is holding his own in half the time is impressive.

So what would happen if we extrapolated that out and imagined Oden played a full game every night? That’s dangerous, of course, since we can’t rely on a healthy Oden, or even one that stays out of foul trouble (a big part of why he only plays only 24 minutes a game; if he played the full 48, he would average exactly 8 fouls a game). But for the moment, let’s imagine the impossible. Let’s imagine he stays healthy and foul-free, and look at the resulting graph:

Just take a moment to soak that in.

These numbers pretty much confirm what we were saying earlier: Durant’s skills are primarily offensive, while Oden’s are defensive. But it really throws into relief just how potent Oden could be. His block stats are literally off the charts. He’d be averaging over five blocks a game. For reference, this season’s block leader, Dwight Howard, averages just under three a game.

His skills aren’t limited to the defensive end, either. He’s putting up a hefty chunk of points, too. That shows he might be more than just the defensive monster we expected. Durant’s graph shows he isn’t just one-dimensional, either, as he’s putting up eight rebounds a night, but that pales a bit in comparison to Oden’s 22 points, I think. If he can stay on the court, he has the potential to be a force of nature.

But that’s the big if.

Both of these guys have stratospheric ceilings. Unfortunately, only one of them has had a chance to show us.

So far, we haven’t seen much to suggest that Oden can play more than 24 minutes a night. In fact, we haven’t seen anything that would suggest that Oden can play a full season. His astronomical foul rate and phenomenonally unlucky injury record have conspired to keep him off the court. But there’s every reason to suspect that his foul rate will come down with experience. As for injuries, we can only hope. No one wants to see a talent like Oden rot in the rehab room for months at a time. Maybe his knees will finally hold up and we’ll get to see a full season. Maybe.

But for right now, we’ll just have to imagine. We can see where Durant’s career has taken him so far. Based on the fact that he’s made the All-Star Game already, we can imagine he’ll go on to make many more and dominate the league statistically. And we can imagine that Oden probably would have been in the same place if his knee were in one place right now. After all, before he went down, there’s little doubt he was one of the top centers in the West. If he were still healthy, he would have been a lock for backup center after (shudder) Amare Stoudemire.

But still, there’s that big if.

Much as I hate to say it, that’s a great nickname for him. That, or the Big Hypothetical. Graphs like this can show us his potential and why Portland leapt at the chance to draft him over Durant, but they can only show us what might be. What could be.

So until we can finally see a full season and The Big If’s full potential, all we can do is imagine.