Two Blazers on a Different Trail: LaMarcus Aldridge and the Greg Oden Factor

LaMarcus Aldridge has generated some debate this season. That happens when a player follows up signing a big contract with what can be considered lower than expected output.

Aldridge has managed to silence much of the debate with his recent play, but I can't help but wonder what really caused his slow start this season.

We've heard the theories. They range from the reasonable (pressure from newly increased expectations) to the ridiculous (a lack of caring). Somewhere in the range of theories is one that has become my personal favorite lately—we'll call it the Greg Oden Factor.

First of all, statistics increase when opportunities increase. It is usually the case that a player's stats will rise, for example, when they get more chances to score/pass/rebound/whatever. That is the first part of the Oden Factor.

With Oden no longer gobbling up rebounds or getting some shots of his own, Aldridge has more opportunities. From a psychological standpoint, being more integral to team success gives a boost as well. A player gets more opportunity to find his rhythm, he doesn't worry as much about missing shots because he knows more are coming regardless.

It should be expected, then, that Aldridge's stats would rise as a result of Oden being out. They have. Look, I even have a graph:

I kept it to points and rebounds for a couple reasons. First, its simple and illustrates my basic point. Second, earlier this season some people were hammering Aldridge on his points and rebounding averages. So now they have to be quiet or at least go back to talking about how he is "too soft" or whatever. We can also see that Aldridge has gotten more consistent with his points and rebounds since the Oden injury.*

We could do a graph and see similar results for Brandon Roy pre- and post-Oden injury. If Mr. Everything struggled a bit with Oden, I think we can give Aldridge a pass this time.

But how much of Aldridge's improvement is due to increased opportunities, and how much is can we attribute to not knowing how to play with Oden? I'm not sure we can disentangle the two.

This leads us to the second part of the Oden factor, which is Portland's three pillars learning to play together effectively. This is an unknown variable massive enough to sway the ultimate potential of this team. We were supposed to be getting this figured out right about now, but, um, yeah, let's not go down that road. (I'm too close to a ledge right now.)

When we were blaming Aldridge for his lowish averages earlier this season, we were missing the real issue entirely.

When we find ourselves being encouraged by his turnaround in these areas, we are doing the same thing.

He wasn't buckling under the expectations that came with his contract and he wasn't slacking. He had fewer opportunities, sure. Like Roy, he was also having some trouble figuring out the Oden Factor.

Any conclusions regarding Aldridge's value to this team will have to wait until at least next season. Again.

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*For nerds only: I wanted to understand how consistently players contribute, so I created a simple statistic that is a crude indicator at best. You take the standard deviation and divide it by their average. This is to account for the fact that players with larger averages will have larger standard deviations simply because they have a bigger possible range of production. Click here for a better explanation.

Aldridge's points consistency went from 2.65 with Oden to 2.93 without. With scoring, All-Stars are usually above 3.00. His rebounding consistency jumped from 2.23 to 2.38.