If you watched Monday night’s exhibition game between the Trail Blazers and the Kings, you saw one moment in the game when Greg Oden got tangled up underneath the basket with a couple of Sacramento players. Oden was attempting to rebound the ball and shoot it, but he seemingly had Kings players hanging all over him. The result of the play, as I recall, was Oden flexing his muscles a bit, then spinning around, sending Sacramento players flying away like kids being thrown off a merry-go-round. Then, a foul was called – against Oden.

My first thought was how much it looked like an average play in the NBA life of Shaquille O’Neal. If you want to keep Shaq from dunking, or shooting an easy shot, you jump on his back, try to grab his arms, hack him extremely hard or commit some form of assault and battery (perhaps all at the same time) – and even then, he might still score. My next thought was, my goodness — it’s going to be this way, throughout his career, for Oden.

Sure, he’s going to deal out a whole lot of punishment, but he’s going to take plenty of it, too. Because of Oden’s power, teams are going to deal with him in a different way than they do with players of average strength. They aren’t going to want to see those monstrous, two-handed dunks. Even though Oden shoots foul shots much better than Shaq, teams are still going to try to keep him from dunking — the points are too easy and it’s, in some cases, too humiliating to see a player that dominant throwing the ball down on your head.

But the problem is, to stop him from dunking is going to take a pretty big effort. Maybe by more than one player. So you’re going to see some pretty physical stuff. You’re going to see people hanging all over him, in fact. We’re already seeing it and he’s just begun his career. It’s going to get much more physical for him and I hope he sees it coming and continues to work in the weight room to get as much muscle on his body as he can, as protection.

There are teams who will even send guys out to rough him up, try to make him lose his cool. There will be referees — you know, the ones with the “little-man complex” — who will not give him a call, in spite of the punishment he’ll take, figuring, I guess, that he’s big enough to take some abuse. There will be strategy employed to grab him, hold him, bump him, trip him and elbow him and he’s going to have to fight his way through it all, without looking like the bully some officials will be waiting for him to be.

It’s nothing new. Every powerful big man in basketball has had to deal with this and each, eventually, has found a way to combat the tactics and settle into a style he’s comfortable playing.

I guess it should have dawned on me earlier, but Blazer fans, think about this for a moment: After all these years of screaming at Shaq and Kareem and Patrick Ewing and Hakeem, you have a new reality. Your days of being the lovable underdog are pretty much over.

You’re rooting for Goliath now. The monster is on YOUR side. How is that for changing your complete personality as a fan?

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