Self-organized criticality can be translated into the language of absorbing state phase transitions. Most models for which this analogy is established have been investigated for their absorbing state characteristics. In this paper, we transform the self-organized critical Oslo model into an absorbing state Oslo model and analyze the avalanche behavior. We find that the resulting gap exponent D is consistent with its value in the self-organized critical model. For the avalanche size exponent tau an analysis of the effect of the external drive and the boundary conditions is required.