NBA
The 23-year-old is the great unknown of the Oklahoma City Thunder—and he’s just scratching the surfaceNBAThe 23-year-old is the great unknown of the Oklahoma City Thunder—and he’s just scratching the surfaceGetty Images/Ringer illustrationBy Logan MurdockJan. 13, 11:30 am UTC • 20 min
As a young kid, Chet Holmgren hardly spoke.
When he was 4 years old, his parents and early-childhood education teachers were concerned enough to arrange for a speech therapist to visit the Holmgren family home.
During the first session, as the specialist made small talk with his parents, Chet ventured over toward the kitchen and picked up two stools. He placed one on the floor and another on the counter and then climbed from one to the other and plucked a box of cookies off a high shelf.
“He does that all the time?” the therapist asked.
“Yeah,” his parents responded.
“Well, that’s why he’s not talking,” the therapist said. “He just goes and gets what he needs. He doesn’t have to ask for it.”
Now 23 years old, Holmgren is still reaching. Last June, he became an NBA champion. One month after that, he signed a five-year, $240 million extension that will keep him in Oklahoma City for the rest of the decade. This season, he’s playing the best basketball of his career, blossoming into the star the Thunder envisioned when they drafted him second in 2022.
The subtle expansion of Holmgren’s game is quietly one of the most consequential stories in the league. His dual-threat ability to shoot the 3 and protect the rim has always made him extremely valuable in the modern NBA, but now he’s layering more creativity and refinement into his skill set. This season, he’s brought an improved handle, a more advanced in-between game, and career-best efficiency to his role on the Thunder—and still, it seems like he’s just scratching the surface of his potential.
“I have a long way to go as an individual player,” Holmgren tells me. “But I’ve never wanted my ability as an individual player to be the ceiling of the team’s capability.”
Holmgren is the ultimate ceiling raiser for a team that already has everything. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is a reigning MVP coming off a historically great calendar year. Jalen Williams has been minted after his star-making romp through last season’s playoffs. The Thunder’s ability to draft and develop high-level rotation players is admired by the rest of the league, their massive stash of future draft picks is feared, and their basketball blueprint is already being copied. The fully realized version of Holmgren—a perennial DPOY candidate who can shoulder more of the Thunder offense—could put Oklahoma City over the top and into truly rarefied air.
Chet Holmgren: No. 21 on The Ringer’s Top 100
Chet Holmgren: No. 21 on The Ringer’s Top 100
Even though the Thunder have already won on the sport’s biggest stage, it seems like the NBA world is still getting to know them. Maybe that’s by design. Maybe it’s because dominance is boring or because they play in one of the league’s smallest markets. Maybe it’s because older fans and media members can’t relate to, or aren’t ready to embrace, a thoroughly Gen Z team. Or maybe OKC just hasn’t spent enough time in our lives yet.
If that’s true, it won’t be the case for long. On Tuesday night, the Thunder will play their much-anticipated rematch against the Spurs, the first of 18 national TV games for OKC over the next two months. In the postseason, they’ll try to become the first back-to-back champions since the 2018-19 Warriors, and then they’ll try to keep their hold on contention, which has been hard to do in the apron era.
But before all that, the Thunder will need to pull themselves out of a midseason swoon that began with three losses to San Antonio in December. OKC is 33-7 overall but just 9-6 in its last 15 games, including a curious blowout at home against the Hornets last week. In a short time, the conversation has shifted from whether the Thunder will break the regular-season wins record to whether they need to bring in reinforcements before February’s trade deadline. Not that Holmgren or his teammates are thinking about anything but the next matchup.
“At the end of the day, we look at those games [against the Spurs], as well as we look at our wins,” Holmgren says. “How can we be better? You got to try to improve, whether you win or lose. And obviously, it’s a lot louder when you don’t win the game.”
This stretch is a reminder that nothing is inevitable or guaranteed in the NBA, for both OKC and Holmgren, who’s still growing into his game.
“Everybody has a window,” Holmgren tells me. “I’m going to do everything I can to make that window stay open as long as possible. Take care of my body, work hard, work on my game, do all the right things. But no matter what you do, one day it’s going to close. And when it does close, I want to say I made the most out of the opportunity that I had, the time I had playing basketball.”
Chet Holmgren shoots during Game 7 of the 2025 NBA FinalsGarrett Ellwood/NBAE via Getty Images
Holmgren’s first major growth spurt came in eighth grade. He had always been lanky and tall for his age, but that year he sprouted from 6-foot-2 to 6-foot-10. By the time he was 18, he’d grown to 7 feet.
“There’s never been anybody that looks like me,” Holmgren says as he slides into the chair across from me at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown San Francisco.
Indeed, Holmgren is hard to miss. At lunch, he spills out from the table. On the court, he’s mesmerizing: a 7-foot-1 bag of bones who puts the ball on the floor like a guard and blots out the rim. Online, he has cultivated an almost meme-like persona with fit pics and odee Gen Z slang.
“You’ll never win against the internet,” he says. “You just have to troll with it and have fun.”
In our interview, Holmgren is confident, comfortable, and armed with careful charisma. He pauses to consider his words, and he is reluctant to reveal too much about himself or his team.
“I don’t feel like people should know too much about me,” Holmgren says. “I mean, at the end of the day, I’m not a politician or something that people have to know their background in order to vote for them. I play basketball, and I try to get out in the community and do good things, be a good person, and do good by my people, and for the most part stay out of drama.”
Rivalries—whether people say it’s between teams or players or franchises, whatever it might be—that’s for fans to have that dialogue.
Chet Holmgren, on his matchup with Victor Wembanyama
Ask Thunder players and personnel to describe Holmgren, and they’ll point to his insatiable love for basketball. Oklahoma City coach Mark Daigneault describes him as a “hooper of all hoopers,” recalling a story from Holmgren’s predraft interview in Chicago back in 2022. Sam Presti, the Thunder’s executive vice president and GM, had made an offhand reference to a Europe trip he took in the aughts to scout Ian Mahinmi, a journeyman center who played in the NBA from 2007 to 2020. “And Chet was like, ‘Oh, Ian Mahinmi. From Indiana and Washington,’” impressing team officials with his encyclopedic knowledge. “That’s not a player from his generation that he would know unless he’s really into basketball,” Daigneault says.
In that sense, Oklahoma City has been the perfect home for Holmgren. Since moving to the Great Plains in 2008, the Thunder have been one of the NBA’s most private and insular franchises. Their organizational credo emphasizes process, attention to detail, and the long view—an approach that helped them build a contender around Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook in the early 2010s and then assemble the second-youngest championship team in NBA history a decade later.
Holmgren, now 23, Gilgeous-Alexander, 27, and Williams, 24, are all signed to long-term contracts, providing a runway for this core to grow and develop together. During win streaks, the Thunder locker room takes on the vibes of a barnstorming high school powerhouse. The team has turned the postgame interview into a family affair. On road trips, they set out together on side quests to thrift stores, bonding over fashion and basking in the spoils of the NBA lifestyle.
“We young and lit,” J-Dub says.
For me to worry about how we’re going to make a salary cap or who we’re going to draft or trade here or there, when you have the best GM probably of all time, that’s pretty fucking stupid to waste time on.
Holmgren
In the NBA, it’s borderline unprecedented for a team to be so young, so good, and so harmonious. Everybody on the Thunder has bought into their role. There is no infighting or conflicting priorities, which have derailed so many talented teams before them. That stems from the organizational ethos that Presti has curated, as well as from the mindset of the Thunder’s best players, who are thoughtful about the pitfalls of success.
“You need your team to buy in to win at the highest level,” Gilgeous-Alexander tells me. “Kobe was by himself after Shaq. He was the best player on the team, and he didn’t win until he embraced his teammates. As good as Kobe was, he didn’t win until he had Pau [Gasol] and he was playing a certain way.”
If Shai is Kobe, then Holmgren would be Gasol: the versatile big man who unlocks the best version of his team. It’s a role he’s familiar with, having played second fiddle to Jalen Suggs in high school and now SGA in the NBA. Holmgren has never scored more than 40 points in a basketball game, at any level at any point in his life. Yet he’s won four state championships, an NBA title, and a gold medal with the U19 USA men’s team.
As the Thunder continue to win, Holmgren is drawing closer to his moment. The opportunity is right there for OKC to become the NBA’s next defining team and for Holmgren to become one of its most recognizable figures.
There are two ways to interpret Holmgren, who has gone viral for, among other things, wearing a do-rag, naming oxtail as his ideal Thanksgiving entrée, and rapping along with Rick Ross while showing off his championship ring. Some people see a white kid from Minnesota who attended a $30,000-a-year private school appropriating Black culture. Others see the authentic expression of an athlete who was raised in a multicultural community and plays in a predominantly Black league. That dichotomy has turned Holmgren’s upbringing into a source of intrigue within the basketball world.
“I’ve never really said anything about where I’m from, how I grew up,” Holmgren says. “If anything, I’ve always just said I grew up blessed. My parents worked extremely hard. They gave me every opportunity that I needed, but I don’t think that limits you from being able to grow up around a diverse community.”
Holmgren was raised in South Minneapolis, about two miles south of Target Center, where he watched Kevin Garnett lay a blueprint for the future of his position. On weekends, the Holmgrens would go on family outings to museums or parks around town or head to their cabin in northern Minnesota to relax and go fishing. When Holmgren was young, his family saved enough to purchase a fixer-upper single-family home in an upper-middle-class enclave of Southwest Minneapolis. “The only way to get into that neighborhood,” Chet’s father, David, recalls, “was to buy the shittiest house in Minneapolis.”
But the Holmgrens found that the realities of suburban life didn’t match their expectations. David says that the neighborhood wasn’t welcoming to his family. “It was supposed to be a liberal part of town,” he says, “but I didn’t find it to be very liberal.” After just nine months, the Holmgrens moved back to the city, purchasing the home in South Minneapolis where Chet spent his formative years.
Never once have I tried to claim a culture that I’m not. At the end of the day, I’m not going to change and act like I’m a suburban kid who has only ever been around people that look like me.
Holmgren
In the city, he connected with Larry Suggs, the father of Jalen Suggs (now the Orlando Magic point guard), and Brian “Big Nation” Sandifer, two prominent area coaches who co-ran the Grassroots Sizzle AAU program.
It was Suggs, a FIBA fanatic, who shaped Holmgren’s game after the image of Arvydas Sabonis, centering his workouts on dribbling, 3-pointers, and fadeaways. Suggs put him through the same program he put his son and other guard prospects through. “You’re going to be a 7-foot version of Jalen,” he told him. Soon enough, Holmgren’s combination of length and skill turned him into the no. 1–ranked basketball recruit in the country. In high school, he led Minnehaha Academy to four straight state championships and earned national attention after crossing up Steph Curry at one of Curry’s own SC30 camps.
He also moonlighted for a year as a linebacker for the West Side Boosters in St. Paul. “I was just a reckless little kid,” Holmgren remembers fondly. “I just liked to hit shit.”
Holmgren says that basketball and the community that formed around it informed his worldview. He played with kids who were Black, white, Mexican American, Native American, and Somali American. “Minnesota has some of the most diverse cultures in America,” he says. “And I grew up around all that.” It pisses him off when people he’s never met who know nothing about his upbringing say that he’s a suburban kid pretending to be something else.
“Never once have I tried to claim a culture that I’m not,” Holmgren says.
“At the end of the day, I’m not going to change and act like I’m a suburban kid who has only ever been around people that look like me. I am who I am.”
Those who knew Holmgren in Minneapolis insist that there’s nothing inauthentic about his personality. People may roll their eyes at his accent or his Instagram activity, but friends and coaches see a kid who was shaped by the place he grew up in and the Black people he grew up around. “They are who they are. They’re not faking,” Sandifer, who is Black, says of the Holmgrens. “They’re just inner-city white kids.”
On May 25, 2020, about two miles from Holmgren’s home, police officer Derek Chauvin put his knee on the neck of George Floyd and held it there until Floyd died nearly 10 minutes later. In response, protests erupted around the country. In Minneapolis, police threw tear gas, the fumes of which drifted into the Holmgren house. A few days after the murder, Holmgren joined thousands of people along the Interstate 35 Mississippi River Bridge to protest police brutality.
“I’ll never understand what it’s like to go outside as a Black man,” Holmgren says. “And I’ll never understand the situations that that can put you in that are out of people’s control. But I would just say I tried to have compassion for my friends and people around me at that time, that it could really be anybody.”
I ask David how it felt to watch his son join a national movement. “It was a proud moment and a nervous moment all in one,” he says. “Silence is compliance. We don’t do that here.”
Chet is less definitive when I ask whether he feels conflicted about potentially going to the White House to commemorate Oklahoma City’s title with President Donald Trump, who called the Somali population in Minnesota “garbage” last month as he unveiled a plan to target immigrants in Holmgren’s hometown. (This interview took place before a masked ICE agent shot and killed Minneapolis resident Renee Good, whom the Timberwolves honored with a moment of silence on Thursday night.) It’s customary for NBA champions to visit the White House—at least, it was until 2017, when the Warriors said that they wouldn’t and then Trump disinvited them. No NBA team went to the White House over the rest of Trump’s first term, but the tradition resumed during Joe Biden’s presidency. With Trump now back in office, it’s unclear whether the Thunder will make the trip when they’re in Washington, D.C., for a matchup against the Wizards this spring.
“Personally, I try to stay out of the whole politics thing,” Holmgren says. “The way I see it is you are given two choices, which really isn’t a choice at the end of the day, and I think we need to mix that up. You can’t have two choices for all issues at the end of the day, because what happens if you’re in the middle or a little bit on one side? You got to pick all the crazy shit on one side or all the crazy shit on the other side. I’m not a politician. I visited the White House. I think it’s a really cool place. It has a lot of history. It’s an important part of our country and our country’s history, but I don’t know, I don’t think that decision’s up to me. Obviously, I’m going to respect the decision that the team makes, but we haven’t talked about it, so I don’t know.”
Holmgren pauses. I ask him what he’s thinking.
“I understand how you take the first half of a quote and completely misconstrue the actual meaning of the full quote,” he responds. “I also understand how something said and turned into text with no proper tonage can be misconstrued. I also understand that I’m a part of a bigger organization, the Thunder, and we have a goal here and a purpose here, and my personal comments and agendas and opinions, whether they align with that or not, are irrelevant. So I just make sure everything that I say isn’t going to hurt what we’re trying to do here or myself in the process. I’d rather say too little than too much.”
A rookie Holmgren defends Nikola JokicGetty Images
A few weeks after he was drafted by the Thunder, Holmgren walked into a gym in Santa Monica to meet Drew Hanlen, the prominent skills trainer who has guided the offseason itineraries of Jayson Tatum, Kevin Durant, Joel Embiid, and more NBA superstars.
Hanlen threw his newest pupil straight into the action, placing him on a team opposite Embiid. In the first game, Holmgren hit a stepback jumper in Embiid’s face. On the other end, he blocked Joel’s shot en route to a victory for his squad. After the game, Hanlen approached Embiid and told him, “You realize everybody in this gym is going to leave and say that Chet was busting your ass.” And Joel was like, “I got you.”
During the next game, Embiid welcomed the gangly teenager to the league. On the first possession, the Sixers center caught the ball in the mid-post, turned to the help side, and blurted out, “Don’t help!” Then he proceeded to put on a clinic. Bully-ball drive. Fadeaway. Knee-to-knee rip-through into a ferocious jam. “Gave him everything,” Hanlen says. By the end of the game, Embiid had run off 17 straight points and carried his group to an easy victory.
Immediately after the run, Hanlen says, “Chet came up to me and was like, ‘What can I do to stop him?’”
Getting stronger to contend with bigger centers has been a point of emphasis throughout Holmgren’s young NBA career. “I’ve worked extremely hard to build my body into being able to go out there and play at a high level and play as much as I want to play,” he says.
Every player, to me, with us, has two responsibilities. The first one is you have to execute the fundamentals. … And then every player has a series of strengths, and we’re just trying to encourage our players to be impactful and efficient with the strengths that they have.
Mark Daigneault
In 2024, the Thunder signed Isaiah Hartenstein, who plays center next to Holmgren in OKC’s starting lineup. But lineups with Holmgren at the 5—in which all five players can space the floor and handle the ball—give the Thunder their game-breaking identity. It’s a vision that hinges on Holmgren’s ability to stay on the court consistently and remain sturdy against bigs like Nikola Jokic, Victor Wembanyama, and Alperen Sengun.
Back in 2022, Holmgren’s first pro season ended before it even began, when he tore a ligament in his foot while trying to defend LeBron James in a summer charity basketball game. He returned for the 2023-24 season and played in all 82 games, finishing second in Rookie of the Year voting and helping the Thunder to the no. 1 seed in the Western Conference. Then, in November of last season, Holmgren broke his hip in a collision with Andrew Wiggins, leaving him bedridden for a month and on the sideline for three.
Down the stretch of the 2024-25 season, Holmgren didn’t play particularly well as he struggled to regain his balance and work his way back into game shape. In the playoffs, he couldn’t get his 3-pointer to fall, but he did sprinkle in some moments of brilliance. Over a three-game stretch against the Nuggets in the second round, he helped hold Jokic to just 33 percent from the field. A week later, he banished his hometown Timberwolves with a 22-point, seven-rebound performance to punch OKC’s ticket to the Finals. Against the Pacers, he “shot the ball like dog shit,” he quips, but his five blocks in Game 7 helped secure the first championship in franchise history.
“I’m pretty amazed at what I was able to do over the course of that playoffs,” Holmgren says. “My will to play through anything, that impressed me. It’s easy to fix a jump shot. It’s harder to fix somebody’s will to play.”
As the confetti fell, Holmgren still felt a pit in his stomach that he hadn’t done enough. Following the parade, he was back in the gym, refining his game, improving his balance on drives, and getting stronger to avoid getting pushed off his spot in the post. He made hundreds of jumpers per day, some from the wing, others from the block.
This season has been Holmgren’s most consistent yet. He’s shooting a career-high 57 percent from the field while averaging 18 points and eight rebounds, perfectly slotting in next to Shai and Williams in the offensive hierarchy. His rim protection remains essential to the NBA’s best defense. His blocks per game are down a smidge, but opponents are shooting just 49 percent on shots near the rim with Holmgren defending.
“I worked extremely hard to come into the season confident and ready to roll,” Holmgren says. “I felt like I was in a great spot coming in this year, and I just have to continue that.”
Holmgren and Victor Wembanyama battle for a reboundBrian Babineau/NBAE via Getty Images
The first stretch of Oklahoma City’s season was dominant. It raced out to a 24-1 start, highlighted by a 16-game winning streak. The second stretch started on December 13, when that run was snapped by the Spurs in the semifinal of the NBA Cup. A week later, San Antonio thoroughly dominated the Thunder in back-to-back matchups and flipped their season on its head. In all three losses, Wembanyama’s length stifled OKC’s offensive flow, while De’Aaron Fox, Stephon Castle, and Dylan Harper carved up its vaunted defense.
The Spurs seemed to relish the wins. Following the NBA Cup triumph, Wembanyama praised his team’s “ethical” style of play, a perceived dig at the Thunder. Following the Christmas victory, Wemby was asked whether he considers the matchup with Holmgren—a fellow slender man to whom he has been compared dating back to their pre-NBA days—to be a rivalry. Wembanyama didn’t hold back.
“No, I don’t think about that,” Wemby said, in his native French. “At least from a basketball standpoint, there’s no comparison [between us].”
A week later, I asked Holmgren how he feels when the term “rivalry” comes up to refer to him and Wembanyama.
“My job is to come play basketball, try and win games,” he says. “And rivalries—whether people say it’s between teams or players or franchises, whatever it might be—that’s for fans to have that dialogue and whatever they want to say.”
“Do you look at it as [a rivalry] when you go into that matchup?” I ask.
“I’d say when we’re playing against any team, I’m focused on the team that we’re playing and what we have to do to win,” Holmgren says.
Rivalry or not, Thunder-Spurs is a chess match, and Holmgren is at the center. His size, length, and shooting gravity provide a possible antidote to Wembanyama, and his rim protection looms large against the Spurs’ attacking guards. So far, Holmgren has struggled to leave his imprint in their matchups this season, averaging just 11 points, seven rebounds, and one block across the three games.
Those losses and the Thunder’s recent struggles have provided a road map for what Holmgren still needs to improve. Sprinkles of unevenness are littered throughout his performances. Three nights after dominating Golden State’s fickle frontline, he produced just six rebounds against Charlotte as OKC was routed at home.
One of the marvels of OKC’s system is the way individual players have grown and developed within the team concept. Holmgren and J-Dub are the prime examples, but the growth of depth pieces like Ajay Mitchell, Lu Dort, Cason Wallace, and Aaron Wiggins is just as important to what the Thunder have built.
“Every player, to me, with us, has two responsibilities. The first one is you have to execute the fundamentals, and that’s the price you pay to be a good player on our team,” says Daigneault.
“And then every player has a series of strengths, and we’re just trying to encourage our players to be impactful and efficient with the strengths that they have. And those things can grow over time, so [Holmgren] is an example of somebody that’s expanded his game. Dub has expanded his game. Mitchell expanded his game. Other guys have narrowed their game and become more impactful and efficient as a result of that.”
You need your team to buy in to win at the highest level. Kobe was by himself after Shaq. He was the best player on the team, and he didn’t win until he embraced his teammates.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander
History suggests that perils are on the way. Infighting between players, coaches, and the front office undermined the Bulls of the ’90s. Infighting between Kobe and Shaq doomed the Lakers dynasty of the 2000s. In the Bay Area, infighting between Kevin Durant and Draymond Green did the same to the Warriors. On top of that, the league’s collective bargaining agreement could make it harder for a small-market team like Oklahoma City to hold on to three max players.
Holmgren thinks that these Thunder can buck those trends. “At the end of the day, we’re very serious about what we do. We understand the outcomes have serious and real consequences on careers, livelihoods, everything. But at the end of the day, we also understand how blessed we are to be doing this every day, wake up, and get to play basketball.
“Also, we don’t have any hotheads or crazy motherfuckers on our team.”
More than anything, he has faith in Presti, the architect. “For me to worry about how we’re going to make a salary cap or who we’re going to draft or trade here or there, when you have the best GM probably of all time, that’s pretty fucking stupid to waste time on.”
In Portland, following a 123-115 win over the Blazers in late November, Jaylin Williams is cracking jokes with his billion-watt smile. Dort is gloating about his new SSENSE personal shopper. Shai is putting the finishing touches on his fit of the night, staring into space to make sure that his aura is on point. I ask Homgren how long he wants to be in Oklahoma.
“I want to play here as long as possible,” he responds. “Not only because I love the opportunity that it’s given me in basketball, but also, I love the environment, I love the people on the team, on the staff, everybody in the building. It really is a joy to show up to work every day.”
In moments like this, it’s hard not to get carried away about everything this Thunder team could accomplish. I ask Holmgren what he thinks his ceiling is.
“See, that’s a trick question, my brother,” Holmgren says. “I know you’re a journalist, but I’ve been doing this a long enough time. I’m going to say this: No matter what I would say to that, it’s the wrong answer because if I say something, it’s one of two things. Either I’m limiting it and the ceiling’s too low, or I’m exaggerating it and the ceiling’s too high. So it’s just like, our ceiling is, my ceiling is what we work for it to be, what we go out there and demand it to be, make it happen.
“How good you are has nothing to do with what you want. It comes down to what you do.”
