Greg Oden Out for the Season
Portland's Greg Oden, the #1 pick in this year's NBA draft, is out for the season before playing his first NBA game after exploratory surgery found extensive damage in his right knee.
Oden hurt the knee--and we're not making this up--getting up off a couch.
The Blazers have scheduled a news conference for 1:30 pm today. We'll update this post if anything else comes out before then.
UPDATE: Here's the official statement from the Blazers:
An exploratory arthroscopic surgery performed on Greg Oden today revealed cartilage damage to the Portland Trail Blazers rookie’s right knee. Oden is likely to miss the 2007-08 NBA season.This is serious. Microfracture surgery is not a joke, and while Oden may have "good signs for a complete recovery" that's by no means any guarantee that he will. Wow, poor Blazers fans."Greg had an arthroscopy and a micro fracture surgery today," said team physician Dr. Don Roberts, who preformed the surgery. "He was found to have articular cartilage damage in his right knee. The area of injury was not large and we were able to treat it with micro fracture, which stimulates the growth of cartilage. There are things about this that are positive for Greg. First of all he is young. The area where the damage was is small and the rest of his knee looked normal. All those are good signs for a complete recovery from micro fracture surgery.
