The 7-foot center was so highly thought of coming out of Ohio State that he was drafted No. 1 by the Trail Blazers in 2007, ahead of Kevin Durant. But one teammate thinks Portland did him no favors by how it handled his many injuries. “I felt like they tried to push him too hard,” Travis Outlaw said on the Talkin’ Blazers podcast. “I really thought, like, let him feel his way out first and then you feed him.” Another teammate, Channing Frye, saw both sides of it. “But, you know when you pick somebody number one, right away you’re trying to show like ‘this is why we picked him,’” Frye said. “I was kind of like, give him that Joel Pyrzbilla role first and then he would have blossomed into something good but they sped his process up.”