Is Portland passing on Jordan (again)?

By Max J. Dickstein, amNewYork Sports Editor | mdickstein@am-ny.com

June 22, 2007

The talent frothing at the top of next week's NBA draft, particularly at the top two spots, takes me back to when I was 4 1/2 years old.

Specifically, to the events of June 19, 1984, the evening of a talent-rich draft that featured a rarified center and an unearthly shooting guard.

Scarcely sentient then, I was not observing the basketball events of the night, so I had no idea that the Portland Trail Blazers, picking after Hakeem Olajuwon was taken first, had passed up on Michael Jordan to draft Sam Bowie, the 7-foot-1 stiff of legend.

This decision, made because Clyde Drexler was then in full glide as Portland's shooting guard, has been judged harshly ever since, and so has Bowie, who in hindsight resembles a woeful troglodyte, even though his 10.9-point and 7.5-rebound career averages were serviceable.

On Thursday, Portland, this time with the No. 1 pick, faces another momentous decision at Madison Square Garden.

Greg Oden, the 7-footer from Ohio State, is their likely target. Kevin Durant, the superlative 6-10 swingman out of Texas, would then fall to Portland's northern neighbor, Seattle, at No. 2.

These top choices are clear this year, as they ought to have been in 1984, when the Portland brain trust would have been better off asking a 4 1/2-year-old kid whom to pick. I might have suggested Charles Barkley or John Stockton, but not Bowie.

In 2007, the top pair is pre-determined -- one of the one-and-done lettermen, Oden, 19, or Durant, 18.

After checking out Oden on Wednesday, Portland has accepted that not only is Oden not Bowie, but his future is All-Star minimum, MVP maximum.

But passing up on Durant, a scoring terror whose game and impact could be some day be Jordanesque -- beyond MVP -- is not a pleasant notion.

The memory of Jordan will hover over the proceedings on Thursday, but so too will Olajuwon and the pair of titles he won between Jordan's three-peats.

Drafting is a futurist science of risk that resists the lessons of history.

But Portland, burned once, will pick safely, and pick Oden.