What?!?! Greg Oden is going to miss his rookie season. When managing your own business there will be times when it feels like nothing is going your way. Now this isn’t a new concept, but there are different ways to deal with it. The injury to Greg Oden is a classic case of when your best option suddenly doesn’t exist anymore. Obviously, he will come back, but, as a business, the Portland Trailblazers can’t afford to blow off a year and wait for Oden to recover.

So what do you do when your best option fails, disappears, or, well, gets hurt…?

As I said before this isn’t a new concept, but there are many different ways to deal with it and sometimes the path you choose will end up taking a toll on your business.

One of the most common ways of dealing with this crisis is using the failed option as a scapegoat. Just take the Portland Trailblazer’s situation. If they end up losing several games this year, then many people will keep citing the fact that Oden is not there as a reason for their misfortunes. Now granted that might be the one of the reasons they are losing, but in the big scope of things you can’t say that a rookie is going to come and turn a team 180 into a championship contender, in his first year. Having this mindset of the scapegoat causes you to keep supporting each non-successful thing that happens until they build up, and now you have dug a deeper hole than before.

I’ll try to use more of a typical business example. Say you are flipping a house and before you started you had a contact within a floor center that said they would give you a good discount on hardwood floors. In many places hardwood floors are really great additions to a house, so, for you, it’s a deal maker to start the project. However, as it comes time to actually buy the floors, the discount that you were supposed to get suddenly is no more. This is where the scapegoat mindset rears its ugly heads for many people. They suddenly become flustered and don’t even continue to look for good deals because in their head they automatically assume that most of their profit has immediately disappeared, and they are quick to throw away the project.

A good way to deal with failed options is to just forget about it and put it behind you. Life is unfair and not everything can always go your way. So if the floor discount is not given, then continue to look for other deals. If time is of an issue, then perhaps look into getting carpet, or see what in your budget can be moved around so that you have enough money to buy the floors. The worst thing a person can do is to slip into the scapegoat mindset. Learning to keep yourself from falling into this abyss will help you become more adapt at handling stressful situations and in turn will make you more successful.

So we can only hope the Portland Trailblazer’s put this mess behind them and try to build their current active roster up until Oden returns and not play for the draft. But in all realness I could careless what they do because… hey… I am a Laker’s fan.For people that don’t know who Greg Oden is…