Cheer Up, Greg Oden: You're Not Nearly as Big a NBA Draft Bust as These Guys

"I will be remembered as the biggest bust ever," said Greg Oden, his big ol' sad face looking over at Jeff Goodman in a dark room somewhere at Ohio State, "but I can't do nothing about that." And you weep. No person should have to look at the path of their life and assign themselves a "Bust" label, let alone because of forces completely beyond their control. Existence is cruel, even for millionaire athletes.

People, acting decently for once in this miserable and undignified wasteland, have stood up for Greg. Kevin Durant, the man picked second after him in the draft, defended Oden's on-court production told ESPN. "When he did play, he was a force," Durant said. "Protecting the paint. They were so good with him and LaMarcus down low, with Brandon Roy [and] Andre Miller at the time. They had a nice team. So he was a big part of that. He's not a bust. He just didn't play a long time because of injuries, and that's just what it is."

It's nice to hear Durant lay some praise on the guy, but Oden wasn't the biggest bust of all time, and not just because he was a fine player who was knifed in the back by fate. People, there have been some SPECTACULARLY bad number one overall picks in the NBA Draft. The word "bust" does not suffice, here. We are in the realm of failures of time and space.

ANTHONY BENNETT (2013)

It's kind of unfair to call Bennett a bust, just because there was no hype surrounding him, and no one but the Cleveland Cavaliers was under the illusion that he was the deserving first pick in this (very lame) draft. But as we've laid out above, life is not fair, and Anthony Bennett is a bust on the merits. The Cavs drafted him for reasons no one understood, and Bennett played poorly; he was traded when LeBron came to town, then gently drifted out of Minnesota and onto the (actually kind of perversely inspiring) Nets, a team without any draft picks and precious few prospects, where Bennett is settling into a long year of not playing very often on a team with maybe three viable NBA players. Bennett is such a bust that you've already forgotten him. At least Oden EXISTED, even if he was made of broken bones and failing knees. Bennett is halfway out the door already.

ANDREA BARGNANI (2006)

"But Corbin," you say, with drool unspooling from your open mouth in an undignified fashion, "Andrea notched 7,873 Career Points!" Yes, my beautiful-yet-simple reader, but that made him even worse. Andrea was so bad at every phase of the game that wasn't foul shooting—sub-average three point shooting; heinous, team-wrecking defense; historically bad rebounding—as to be nearly unemployable in the NBA, but his status as a top pick and his marginal gift for scoring kept him floating through the league like a ghost for nearly a decade, even as he destroyed every team he touched like the White Death.

Greg Oden might have been a bust, but the Blazers weathered his injuries and managed to throw spunky, playoff-caliber teams out there even before transitioning away from their broken big man as a dream centerpiece. Bargnani's maleficence kept the Raptors in purgatory for YEARS, his blank expression the hideous orange lamp in a room that was just trying to be respectable for one second, a curse that haunts you and wrecks your whole family. Truly, much worse than a stink bug that blows up in your eyes and grosses you out for a while.

LARUE MARTIN (1972)

The Original Portland Center Bust, LaRue Martin had a good showing in front of a Portland Trail Blazer scout, fit right into the team's concept of what it needed at the time—a big man, as has been the case for all teams in history—got taken WAY too high as a result, then spent his career just sort of not fulfilling expectations. He got traded to Seattle after four sad seasons in Portland, was cut by the Sonics, and then left basketball forever. He was not temperamentally set up to be a top pick, and was routinely pushed around by smaller players in practice. He wasn't much of a basketball player, but his career had a tragic aspect to it: here was a vulnerable man who was devastated by the whole experience of being a basketball flameout.

BUT, and I hope Greg Oden is reading this, LaRue Martin's life did not end there. He invested well, went back to school at Loyola Marymount, RETURNED TO PORTLAND—everyone there was pretty nice to him in his third and fourth years with the team, after he busted out, apparently—and worked for Nike and UPS. He got Blazers season tickets, hung out on the baseline and talked to everyone who asked about the shittiest time of his life, was central to one of the better passages in The Breaks of the Game (Page 90 in my edition), and seems to have had a pretty good life, all things considered. There is hope for you, Greg! There is hope for all people! (Except Steve Bannon, who is bad and will surely go to hell, when his time comes.)

GENE MELCHIORRE (1951)

Oden might have been on and off (surgery) benches during his unglamorous NBA career, But "Squeaky" Gene Melchiorre wasn't even ALLOWED In the NBA because he was a point-shaving crook. He was caught in 1952, faced misdemeanor jail time, plead guilty, and stayed out of jail. But his professional basketball dreams were dashed, like so many point shavers in the Pre-ABA Days. You can tuck an "alas" into that last sentence if you want.

I'm sure the Baltimore Bullets, the team that drafted him, were pissed off at how things worked out. But probably not that pissed, seeing as every NBA team was just barely above water, in those days. "Oh shit, we lost our point-shaving draft pick, but also we need a sub-Globetrotters basketball clown team to do a double header with us so we can fill, like, half the gym tonight," we might imagine one Bullets front office employee saying to another. "Also we think our coach has tuberculosis, but he refuses to see a doctor because he thinks they're going to steal his sperm and give it to the government, so Gene is, realistically, a second-tier problem for us right now."

Melchiorre was later inducted into the Greater Peoria Sports Hall of Fame. The website is offline now, but a trip through the Wayback Machine reveals that the museum did not mention the point shaving in their online roundup of his career. This proves, once and for all, that Barry Bonds will not enter Cooperstown with a plaque that mentions his shameful PED usage, squaring him with the truth of history, because Halls of Fame will not face ugliness and call it like it lays.

CLIFTON MCNEELY (1947)

McNeely also didn't play in the NBA but not for a cool reason, like crime, or getting your shooting arm chopped off in the woods. The extremely lame reason is that he just skipped pro ball altogether and became a high school basketball coach in Texas. John Wooden, who was also kind of lame, did the same thing. Pro basketball was not a lucrative path at the time, only a test of glory and power. it was a path trod by the brave and the beautiful, not for nerds who were hunting paychecks.

McNeely did fight in World War II, though, which means he did his part to purge our world of fascists. A shame he couldn't finish the job, but what are you gonna do, right?

ANYWAY: Greg Oden wasn't the biggest bust of all time. Some of these dudes didn't even play in the NBA, and one of them was Andrea Bargnani, who would honestly have done more good for his teams if he had been embroiled in a point shaving scandal or decided he'd rather be coaching high school kids. And even if Oden was the biggest bust—which, again, he was not—that is not all he was, or all he could be. There's a light on the other side, a life to be led that can still be very rewarding.