Chad FordofESPN.com(insider)has an early lookat this summer's top free agents. He ranks Portland Trail Blazers center Greg Oden as the No. 5 restricted free agent on the market (behind Marc Gasol, DeAndre Jordan, Rodney Stuckey and Jeff Green) and writes... ----------------------- Saying that Oden is a huge question mark is the understatement of the year. Right now, he's making Sam Bowie look like an iron man. He has already had three major surgeries and will have played a total of just 82 games in four seasons. But when he has played, he's shown signs of stardom. In the 21 games he played in 2009-10, before a broken kneecap ended his season, he was sporting a whopping 23.14 player efficiency rating. If Oden can ever get healthy -- and it's a huge "if" at this point -- he still has time to become a dominant NBA big man (he just turned 23 years old). But whoever signs him to a contract will do so without having seen him play for more than a year and a half. Is any team, including Portland, willing to take that risk? Right now, it sounds like the Blazers are. We'll see how this intriguing story actually plays out. ----------------------- Ford also ranks Blazers point guard Andre Miller as the No. 5 "option candidate" but writes: 'He's owed almost $8 million next year if the Blazers don't exercise his team option, and I think the most likely scenario is that they hang onto him until they can get some sort of value in return." -- Ben Golliver | benjamin.golliver@gmail.com |Twitter