Maybe it should be considered the curse of Bonzi Wells. Maybe it’s just karma for having an inept owner who treats his sports franchises like they were his personal comedy club.

But for whatever reason, the Portland Trailblazers, as hard as they try, just cannot seem to escape the injury bug.

Of course, yesterday was marked by the bombshell announcement of Brandon Roy’s retirement. Roy, at one point the team’s franchise player, was being looked at as a potential fan-favorite comeback player of the year candidate by people (myself included, having been one of his biggest fans since his days with the University of Washington) who saw his heroics during the first round of the playoffs against the Dallas Mavericks as a sign that if given enough time to recuperate during the off-season from repeated operations on his knees, he would reestablish himself as one of the league’s most dominant offensive menaces, either for Portland or for another team should Portland have used the Amnesty clause on him.

Sadly, the absence of cartilage in both knees proved to be too much to overcome, at least according to reports, which claim that Roy will file for medical retirement, ending a five year career that showed plenty of flashes of sheer brilliance and clutch play.

And it would have been bad enough for most teams to suffer from the ramifications of this type of announcement... but of course, most teams did not draft Greg Oden with the number one pick in the 2007 NBA Draft, a draft that featured Kevin Durant, who could have played the same role Roy played for the Blazers during his brief, injury-plagued tenure in Portland (of course, nobody is denying that hindsight is 20/20). Oden, a restricted free agent entering the off-season, agreed to the one-year, $8.9 million dollar offer Portland laid out on the table prior to the lockout, looking to redeem himself to a city that has been sorely disappointed by his paltry performance and lack of development into the dominant force in the paint that he was projected to become.

Of course, the only shot at redemption Oden has involves him being healthy enough to return to the court... but evidently, that still appears to be a problem for poor Gregory. An examination on Thursday revealed that Oden’s injured left knee had suffered a setback, and that the late January timetable to return to action will likely be pushed back into the middle of February.

Basically, with sixty-six games to prove that he can be a durable, intimidating presence in the paint for a basketball team, Oden will only manage to play approximately 35 games, at the most. I’m guessing more along the lines of 20 realistically speaking. Oden looks destined to cement his status as a bust in Portland.

With Oden having never established himself and Roy dealing with his own injury woes, the Blazers turned to their other homegrown talent, Lamarcus Aldridge, whom they also drafted in the first round of the 2006 draft along with Roy. Aldridge established himself as the franchise player for Portland last season, averaging career highs in points (21.8), rebounds (8.8), and blocked shots (1.2).

And so of course, it would only be fitting for Aldridge to require an operation to deal with a longstanding fight against Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome, a rare heart condition that only causes problems to would-be patients sporadically.

Yeah, I didn’t make that last part up. Aldridge went under the knife on Friday and will now be out for two weeks, perhaps not ready to get into the action come the start of the regular season, especially due this season’s grueling nature.

And yet, despite all of these major injury concerns and Paul Allen’s sheer apathy that has led to the team currently being run without a general manager, this Portland team will enter the season in relatively good shape. With Raymond Felton ready to have a breakout season at the point guard position after last year’s improvement with New York and the steady play to be received from Wesley Matthews, Gerald Wallace, Marcus Camby, and Nicolas Batum, this team will definitely be a playoff contender, especially when Aldridge comes back (and the condition he has will go away and likely not be a concern for the remainder of the season). They might lack the depth that they once had at all positions of the court, but this might be the most defensive-oriented Portland squad we’ve seen since Rasheed Wallace was getting Tee’d up and Ruben Patterson was (falsely) calling himself the “Kobe Killer” for the Jail Blazers.