For six minutes, you could see exactly why the Thunder felt they needed to back the Brinks truck for Isaiah Hartenstein this summer … and why his early season absence with a broken bone in his left hand seemed especially damaging for Oklahoma City against one . Denver Nuggets team it spent the whole last season dueling for the West number 1 seed.
It’s not exactly surprising when Nikola Jokić gets where he wants, when he wants to do whatever he wants; that’s what three-time Most Valuable Players do. But as he blithely cruised through the visiting Thunder early Thursday — six points, three assists, two rebounds, a block and a steal in the first half of the first quarter, completely in control of the game — it looked like you could see. the boundary of the pre-existing structure of Oklahoma City.
Yes, playing the super-talented Chet Holmgren as your full-time center provides plenty of 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 shoots to body up, block and carry down a massive, damaging monster like Jokić all by himself — rather than tag-teaming with another, sturdier 7-footer in Hartenstein in the Long on the Ball with Longer Behind coverage — which the Timberwolves deployed so well in the 2024 playoffs — seemed like a recipe for getting pushed inside, giving up offensive rebounds, and generally not being able to slow down a Denver offense designed to pulverize.
And then the game continued, and it became clear that, quiet as it is, bamboo is much stronger than it looks.
TNT color commentator Stan Van Gundy said it several times Thursday night, but only because it bore repetition: In a game with the top two finishers in 2023-24 MVP voting, winner Jokić and runner-up Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, it was Holmgren. , just starting 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 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 itself as close as that final margin.
The 22-year-old persevered through Jokić’s early bulldozing, doing his job early – trying to get low and push the bigger man away from the basket so he could catch the ball further from the rim, and fighting tooth and nail to divert gateways into the post or at least make sure Jokić didn’t get a clean catch. He endured the shoulder check, showing impressive core strength to stay balanced so he could use his impressive 7-foot-6 wingspan to continue to hit shots high, even after he gave 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 threats — he was dominant. He grabbed 10 defensive rebounds and tapped in a few others, several of which limited Denver to one shot during the 18-2 third-quarter run with which OKC opened the game. He finished with a game-high 11 contested shots and two deflections to go with four blocks and two steals; Denver shot right 6-for-18 with him defending the shooter, including a 5-for-11 mark (45.5%) at the rim, according Second Spectrum.
Holmgren made his presence felt on the other end, too, using the threat of his shooting — though he missed all five 3-pointers he took Thursday, essentially the only thing he didn’t excel at in the opener — and his speed advantage. to attack closes and achieve his mid-level draw. 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 downward pressure to draw defensive help before splashing the ball out to teammates; he finished with five assists, a total he surpassed only five times as a rookie. And if he had a step on Jokić when the Thunder gained possession, he got on his horse – which had to be especially painful for Nikola — and rushed hard straight to the edge, sometimes with explosive results:
With only one “true” big available due to Hartenstein and Jaylin Williams being sidelined with 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 dominant. The Thunder allowed 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. in height Without the guy they imported, in part, for this match.
Holmgren’s arrival last season provided a nitrous oxide boost to the Thunder’s rise up the Western Conference standings in part because of how his presence on the perimeter opened up the floor for the sinewy and devastating Gilgeous-Alexander — who, in case you’re wondering, is still firmly unjust:
What made Holmgren’s performance so exciting Thursday, though, was how confidently he led the charge to make Denver feel half-court claustrophobic — 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 West’s best; and how it, at least for one night, disarmed what had been the most consistently overpowering 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 take away. A version of Holmgren that creates and deletes it this effectively, this continuously, against this level of opposition can help Oklahoma City not only hold firm while Hartenstein recovers, but feel confident about dreaming the biggest dreams the sport has to offer — All-Star berths, All-NBA selections and NBA championships.
All of that feels so far away in October, after the first of 82. Good thing, then, that a 7-foot-6 wingspan can reach for real, really far away
