A FEW MILES OUTSIDE OKLAHOMA CITY, on a two-lane road with barbed wire fences and hay bales framing the view, Chet Holmgren is driving his black SUV to an undisclosed location. He glances out the window and nods his head, almost as if the scenery requires some kind of acknowledgment, like you were seeing a known landmark. Rolling green land attached to a picturesque blue sky dotted with clouds, stretching seemingly into infinity. 

“I don’t exactly know where we’re going,” he says with a grin, “but the road there looks like Oklahoma for sure.”

We are heading to the site of a future community project Holmgren is behind to survey the land and take a moment to absorb the vision. Right now, it’s just a nondescript field with overgrown grass, a green WM metal trash container and a small, faded yellow and black Cat bulldozer. It doesn’t look like much of anything in a place where not much is to be expected, but in a few minutes, Holmgren is talking about what it could be. 

Community mindfulness is something Holmgren’s family instilled in him, with his parents routinely hosting large Thanksgiving gatherings for extended friends, or just simply the family budget having a spot reserved for giving back. 

Naturally, Holmgren brought a ball with him, because he brings a ball pretty much anywhere he goes. He always wants one in his hands, to flip, to dribble, to spin, to shoot straight into the air. If there is a basketball within reach, he’s going to give the universally known gesture of putting his hands out to say, “let me see that real quick.” It’s clear to anyone that spends 30 seconds with Holmgren – he is a basketball junkie. 

Which, of course, is what made the last year all that much more difficult for Holmgren. On a routine, innocent play in a Pro-Am game in Seattle, he planted his right foot to lift off and block a LeBron James layup. Holmgren’s foot twisted slightly and he pulled up to lightly limp off the floor. In the coming days, after second and third and fourth opinions, the bad news: A Lisfranc fracture and he would miss the entire 2022-23 season. 

Holmgren had been hurt before, but he’d never missed more than a few days of basketball. “Dog, I broke both wrists,” he says. “It was trees, playgrounds, stupid stuff.” Jammed fingers, rolled ankles. Even then, he’d still play. He broke his right wrist when he was in middle school, and with a cast on his shooting arm, he played left-handed for a few months. (And if you’ve ever seen him shoot with his left hand and didn’t know, you think it was his dominant hand. It’s that smooth.)

“I’d never really missed basketball,” he says, “so that was one of the hardest experiences, being told to go home and sit down.”

One of the things he did was connect in the Oklahoma City community. His introduction, like most players, didn’t come on the court, but off it. He was at events, like the opening of the expansion of Scissortail Park, spending time with hospitalized kids on Halloween, hosting Thanksgiving dinner for Citizens Caring for Children families and winter coat giveaways in Minneapolis, Spokane and OKC. And now he stands in this field, eager to see a new vision come to life. It’s been some time in the making, a process that requires trust and relationships, with planning and ideas and blueprints, but eventually, it will be real. It will be tangible. It didn’t happen overnight, and it’ll be worth the wait. 

It’s time to head back and Holmgren tucks the ball back under his arm. He stops to turn around for some fist bumps to thank those that tagged along for coming, looking back at the land one more time before ducking into his Denali. 

“See y’all at work tomorrow.”

WORK IS PRETTY MUCH ALL Chet Holmgren has done for the last 12 months. Punch in, punch out. Show up early to the Thunder ION, leave later than most. Rehab, lift weights, shoot a little on one leg, lift again, rehab some more, leave, wake up, do it all over again. 

It is a year to the day since Holmgren woke up in Carmel, IN, with some new hardware in his right foot. He’s feeling a little reflective about it, thinking back to the journey he’s been on, posting a picture of his view from that hospital bed he woke up in with a caption that ends with “this is my new year.” A few weeks before, he posted “I was broke, but I didn’t break.” 

We’re sitting in the Thunder ION, looking out onto a bare court, the gym having emptied out about an hour before from some offseason workouts. The night after his surgery, he was on this floor with his foot in a boot, rolling around with one leg on a scooter shooting baskets. Three hundred and sixty-five days ago, it all felt so far away. 

“So far,” he says. “And we’re here now.”

Holmgren had just hammered through the same kind of routine that had been a staple of his last year, ending in the weight room, but now, he’s revving up for real action. He’s in full preparation mode. But it’s impossible not to look back to the road to here, with the setback in the Pro-Am postponing the dream he’d worked so hard to realize. 

“When I was really in the thick of it, waking up from surgery and stuff, I just tried to keep an understanding that this is one of the bumps in the road you have to go over,” he says. “Obviously you don’t want it to be there, but there’s no going around it. Nobody else could factor in my effort, so I just tried to lead with as much effort as possible and find every possible way to come back and be better from it.

“One way or another, I saw myself getting to this point,” he says. “Some of the toughest days and some of the hardest parts of the rehab process, I just understood if I keep waking up each morning doing what I need to do, this point will come. It’s just going to be a matter of time. Looking back, it went so quick, but looking forward, it seemed so far away.”

Holmgren is nothing if not self-aware and he didn’t need to open the Internet to know what people were saying about him after the injury. There was already a narrative – too tall, too skinny, too whatever – and getting hurt was fuel to that fire. But those same questions have existed since middle school and all Holmgren has done is overcome and answer them, at every level. 

The book on Holmgren says he’s a fierce competitor, fearless, plays with an edge and a physicality that defies perception. What it leaves out is the philosophical flair, a high-minded, thoughtful essence where the one-liners roll out like he’s quoting something he got off the Get Motivated subreddit. 

Like: “I don’t have time to sit there and dwell on doubts. Because doubt is really just an imagination of the future.”

Whoa. 

You’d think maybe it comes from a lot of reading, but Holmgren admits he’s more of a podcast/audiobook guy. He just listened to Robert Greene’s collaboration with 50 Cent called “The 50th Law.” That kind of stuff fuels his appetite for perspective and understanding, and played a part in his resolute attitude in working through the injury. 

“That was one of the big things in talking with Sam (Presti), Mark (Daigneault) and Donnie (Strack), they’ve seen it before. I’m not the first player to get injured,” he says. “One thing they told me was me being injured and coming in here with a bad attitude, bringing down the culture of everything, I could be an anchor to a ship that’s trying to move along. 

“I was already not able to help as much as I want to,” he says, “and the last thing I wanted to do is be pulling the team in the wrong direction.”

WHEN CHET STARTED PLAYING BASKETBALL around third grade, he wasn’t good. “Terrible” is how he describes it himself. 

“I was awful,” he says. “I mean, everybody was awful, but I was bigger than everybody so I thought I was good.” He was close to six feet tall already, but on his AAU team, he was the self-proclaimed worst one. He was lanky and uncoordinated and couldn’t quite channel the positive competitive qualities into good basketball. He started getting better in eighth grade, where he went from 6-foot-2 to 6-foot-10, then a little better in ninth grade and in 10th grade, it all started coming together. He had good youth coaches and high-level teammates, and with his unique frame, he wasn’t just planted on the block to try and bully opponents in the post. 

“It forced me to learn the game and learn ways to be effective without just relying on size,” he says. “I understand my advantages and I understand my weaknesses. If I’m sitting here trying to arm wrestle someone that’s stronger than me, I’m probably not gonna win. It’s just trying to play to my advantages.

“Growing up, I wasn’t the dude out there scoring 30, so I’ve got to impact the game other ways,” he says. “Early on my coaches taught me, if you can shoot and play defense you can be on the court and be a really effective player and if you can’t play defense, it really limits your ceiling as a player. That was really driven into me. So I had to find ways to play defense without just being bigger and stronger than everyone.”

His mindset as a player has always centered around the team concept, how he can elevate the group, how he can be additive to the greater goal. He seeks the gray areas of the game, the invisible impacts, the sometimes thankless jobs that do nothing more than just help you win. He wants to be a good teammate, because it’s an important element to having a good team. 

“Thankfully, I’ve grown up playing with other really good players. Fifth grade, we had a team with three future NBA players on it. Almost the whole team went Division I,” he says. “I have an understanding that if you try to make it about yourself you will limit them, and it will limit yourself at the same time. 

“In 1-on-1, you’ve got to be better than the other dude, but in 5-on-5 your five has to be better than the other five. So trying to make your five better and elevate the floor of the five you’ve got has always been my goal. Because I put winning over everything. Almost to a fault at some points.”

What does that mean, though, to a fault? 

“It’s about finding the balance of personal aggression on the court and team aggression, and how that all mixes together,” he explains. “Sometimes if I’m more aggressive, it helps the team, depending on who is on the floor, the play call, all that.” 

There were times he was maybe too good of a teammate, trying to fit too much, trying to play a role too specifically. He’s a true unicorn-type of player, and with the kind of talent he possesses, sometimes there were times where helping the team meant tapping into his talent. And those are the kind of learning elements he’ll be faced with this season as he plays his first NBA games against the best players he’s ever tested his game against. 

What he wants to do, just like he tried his best to do last season from the sideline, is help. It’s just, well, his nature.

“Every role in basketball, I’ve done it,” he says. “I’ve sat on the bench and not played. I’ve been the star player that’s taken all the shots and everything in between. And now I’ve been the dude who’s been injured and can’t play.

“Obviously, I haven’t played 82 games in the NBA against the best players in the world, but I have an understanding that there’s a bigger picture. There’s gonna be mistakes, we’re gonna lose games. There’s gonna be rough spots, we’re gonna have great games, we’re gonna have games we shoot the ball well, we’re gonna have games where one dude shoots it well and no one else does. We’re gonna see everything. It’s about having an understanding of all of it. That’s how you keep each individual thing from rattling you.”

IT WAS THE THUNDER’S SECOND game of the Salt Lake Summer League the first week of July and Memphis Grizzlies forward Jake Laravia caught the ball on the left wing and had a completely clear runway to the rim. He took two dribbles and as he entered the left block to plant his feet to take off for a dunk, there was still no one within three feet of him. The lane is 16 feet wide and now, having recognized the urgency of the situation, Chet Holmgren was standing on the right block, on the other side of the rim. Laravia went up for what looked like a sure dunk, and really, the kind someone is almost always caught late in rotation and gets put on the proverbial poster with. 

Instead, Holmgren closed the gap and got a hand on the ball, saving OKC two points. It was just an absurd play, the kind that seems to require some kind of explanation. “A lot of it is having no hesitation,” he says. “If you hesitate, you’re late.”

He thinks for a moment and adds one more element: “Being huge helps.” Good explanation. 

Holmgren’s emphatic two-handed blocks have become something of a signature play for him already. It’s unusual to see shotblockers go up with two hands, but Holmgren explains it’s all about timing, positioning and anticipation. He tries to see patterns before they happen. 

“If you get there late, you don’t have time,” he says. “You have to wind up and jump square to go with two hands, but if you get there late you have to jump and reach with one.” 

He’s going to get dunked on this year. He knows it’s going to happen. And he’s not worried about it one bit. Because if you’re going to be a shotblocker, you have to accept sometimes, you won’t get it. 

“The biggest thing is not being afraid to get dunked on,” he says. “You get dunked on, he did his job better on that play. My job is to go block it, so I’m going to go do my job every time.”

That fearlessness is what led to the broken wrists falling out of trees, and it’s what brings the tenacity Holmgren has already become known for. He wonders out loud if it actually is fearlessness, or maybe actually hard-headedness, but either way, it’s essential to the Chet Holmgren ethos. Nobody ever gets anything easy on him – ever. 

“His mindset is as unique as his game,” Sam Presti says. 

Holmgren is, though, still a rookie – officially speaking. He’s young, like his team, and adapting is always a process in basketball, even with an additive player like Holmgren. “A lot of people are talking about this being Chet's first season, and it is in one sense,” Presti says, “but it's really our first season with Chet more than it's Chet's first season.”

He changes the geometry of the game in a significant way, on both ends of the floor. He gives the Thunder a new element as a rim protector and a lob-catcher, but it also runs in contrast to the identity the team forged last season playing a lot of smallball lineups. He also has never played a real basketball game with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

“Playing with a dude like that is gonna be amazing,” he says, calling SGA a pick-up-the-ball-and-get-30 kind of player. “As a team, it’s gonna be the bigger picture, though. We’re gonna have mistakes, we’re gonna have to figure out how it all fits together.” This team hasn’t had someone that is necessarily a lob threat. So, figuring out the timing and chemistry of that will take time. Other small nuances.”

There are a lot of areas Holmgren feels like he got better at because of his injury. A lot of individual things – shooting, specific moves, ball-handling – he had a lot more time to zero in on. But you can’t replicate live action, and you can’t simulate chemistry. There were individual benefits to him not playing, and there were team benefits in the development from last season. Blending the two elements together is the trick. 

He tried to learn as much as he could from the sideline last season, actively engaging in huddles in games and practices, asking questions, watching film sessions, ball under his arm at all times, mentally repping as if he were playing. There were individual benefits to him not playing, and there were team benefits in the development from last season. Blending the two elements together is the trick. 

“Watching the game from 10 feet away you see a lot of stuff that you don’t really see on TV,” he says. “I learned that this summer playing with and against a lot of dudes in the NBA. In live action, you pick up on things you can’t see on TV.” 

But there is no substitute for the real deal. The nuances of the game, the small things, the non-verbal communication. He talks about looking forward to alley-oops with SGA and Josh Giddey, and I mention Giddey admitting himself that he’s not the world’s best lob thrower. 

“Can’t blame him, he hasn’t thrown any!” Holmgren laughs. “That’s like saying you can’t shoot, but you’ve never shot a shot! But we’re gonna get there, it’s gonna take practice and being in the gym together.”

All of it – the shotblocking, the lobs, the physical matchups, the intense competitive battles – is finally almost here. A year ago, Holmgren’s injury felt like a gutting setback, the kind of disappointment that could derail a season. Instead, the Thunder plowed ahead, and so did Holmgren, only trying to find ways to eventually be better from it. And I wonder, has he thought much about that first game, hearing his name called in an actual NBA game, or that first block or first dunk? He looks back out onto the court and shakes his head. Nah, there’s no time for that. 

“I’m a busy guy,” he says. “I’ve got a lot I’m working on.”