How Chet Holmgren went toe-to-toe with the reigning MVP and has OKC daring to dream

For six minutes, you could see exactly why the Thunder felt like they needed to back up the Brinks truck for Isaiah Hartenstein this summer … and why his season-starting absence with a fractured bone in his left hand seemed particularly damaging for Oklahoma City against a Denver Nuggets team it spent all of last season dueling for the West’s No. 1 seed.

It’s not exactly surprising when Nikola Jokić gets where he wants when he wants to do whatever he wants; that’s kind of what three-time Most Valuable Players do. But as he blithely ambled through the visiting Thunder in the early going on Thursday — six points, three assists, two rebounds, a block and a steal in the first half of the first quarter, completely controlling the game — it seemed like you could see the limit of Oklahoma City’s pre-existing structure.

Yes, playing the über-skilled Chet Holmgren as your full-time center affords a great many benefits for a Thunder offense that wants to go five-out as much as possible. But relying on a 7-foot-1 bundle of bamboo stalks to body up, block out and bear down on a massive, mauling monster like Jokić all by himself — rather than tag-teaming with another, burlier 7-footer in Hartenstein in the Length on the Ball with More Length Behind coverage the Timberwolves deployed so well in the 2024 playoffs — seemed like a recipe for getting pushed around inside, giving up offensive rebounds and generally being unable to slow down a Denver offense designed to pulverize.

And then the game kept going, and it became clear that, quiet as it’s kept, bamboo’s a hell of a lot stronger than it looks.

TNT color commentator Stan Van Gundy said it multiple times Thursday night, but only because it bore repeating: In a game featuring the top two finishers in 2023-24 MVP voting, winner Jokić and runner-up Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, it was Holmgren, just beginning his sophomore season, who often looked like the best player on the floor. After that shaky early start, Holmgren shined, finishing with 25 points, a career-high-tying 14 rebounds and five assists in 36 minutes in a 102-87 Thunder win — an impressive, emphatic performance that, for most of the second half, didn’t even feel as close as that final margin.

The 22-year-old persevered through Jokić’s early bulldozing, committing to doing his work early — trying to get low and push the bigger man away from the basket so that he’d catch the ball farther away from the rim, and fighting tooth and nail to deflect entry passes into the post or at least make sure Jokić wasn’t getting a clean catch. He weathered the shoulder-checking, showing off impressive core strength to stay balanced so he could use his prodigious 7-foot-6 wingspan to continue to impact shots up high, even after he’d given up a step:

Holmgren operated as the primary matchup on Jokić and the last line of defense all night, and — with plenty of help from the Thunder’s cadre of elite point-of-attack menaces — he was dominant. He grabbed 10 defensive rebounds and tapped out a few others, several of which limited Denver to one shot during the 18-2 third-quarter run with which OKC blew the game open. He finished with a game-high 11 contested shots and two deflections to go with four blocks and two steals; Denver shot just 6-for-18 with him defending the shooter, including a 5-for-11 mark (45.5%) at the rim, according to Second Spectrum.

Holmgren made his presence felt on the other end, too, leveraging the threat of his shooting — though he missed all five 3-pointers he took Thursday, basically the only thing he didn’t excel at in the opener — and his quickness advantage to attack closeouts and get to his midrange pull-up. He rolled hard to the basket off the pick-and-roll, using his length and touch to finish through contact.

He kept Oklahoma City’s drive-and-kick machine moving, facing up and applying downhill pressure to draw defensive help before spraying the ball out to teammates; he finished with five assists, a total he surpassed just five times as a rookie. And if he had a step on Jokić when the Thunder gained possession, he got on his horse — which must have been particularly painful for Nikola — and sprinted hard straight to the rim, sometimes with explosive results:

With only one “true” big available due to Hartenstein and Jaylin Williams being sidelined by injuries, Oklahoma City head coach Mark Daigneault essentially matched Holmgren’s minutes with Jokić’s, the period when the Nuggets’ offense has historically been at its most overwhelming. The Thunder allowed a microscopic 93.4 points per 100 possessions in Holmgren’s minutes — several thousand miles below the top-five offensive mark the Nuggets produced last season — and outscored Denver by 14.7 points-per-100 in that span.

On the road. At altitude. Without the guy they imported, in part, for this matchup.

Holmgren’s arrival last season provided a nitrous-oxide boost to the Thunder’s rise up the Western Conference ranking partly because of how his presence on the perimeter opened up the floor for the sinuous and devastating Gilgeous-Alexander — who, in case you’re wondering, is still firmly unfair:

What made Holmgren’s performance Thursday so exciting, though, was how confidently he led the charge to make Denver feel half-court claustrophobia — how that emboldened the likes of Luguentz Dort, Alex Caruso and Cason Wallace to make life even more miserable on the Nuggets’ scorers; how it fanned the flames of doubt that this version of the Nuggets has enough outside shot-making (just 7-for-38 from 3-point range) and perimeter talent to go toe-to-toe with the best of the West; and how it, for one night at least, disarmed what has been the most consistently overwhelming offensive weapon in the NBA over the last half-decade.

“He was relentless tonight,” Gilgeous-Alexander said of Holmgren after the game.

So much of success in the modern NBA comes down to space: how much of it you can create, and how much of it you can erase. A version of Holmgren that creates and erases it this effectively, this relentlessly, against this level of opposition can help Oklahoma City not just hold fast while Hartenstein heals, but feel confident in dreaming the biggest dreams the sport has to offer — All-Star berths, All-NBA selections and NBA championships.

All that feels very far off in October, after the first of 82. Good thing, then, that a 7-foot-6 wingspan can reach really, really far.