OKC Thunder rookie Chet Holmgren is chasing greatness and isn't afraid to fail on the way

Chet Holmgren was face-to-face with what he was chasing. It still wasn’t enough.

As sweat dripped from his chin in an unbearably humid Los Angeles gym, the Thunder forward absorbed every minute of wisdom Hall of Famer Kevin Garnett could offer. Streaks smeared the court below Holmgren from pawing the sweat below him. The perspiration only further defined his ribcage, which protruded from his shirt. The slenderman, hardened by brisk Minnesota wind, set up shop beneath the California sun for much of the summer in hopes of tracking down the world’s best hoopers.

“I'm really chasing the pinnacle of it,” Holmgren later told The Oklahoman.

On that sweltering day, he got awfully close.

Even deep into his 40s, there’s an uncompromising aura about Garnett. His 6-foot-11 frame is as daunting as when he played for Holmgren’s hometown Timberwolves. He still believes anything is possible. His bark still permeates every room he’s in. He might literally bark aloud.

Garnett is just as ardent about the game’s next generation. Its future torch bearers. When he caught up with Holmgren weeks earlier, they embraced over their love of blocked shots. They smirked at their age gap, that the young center caught Garnett’s prime on YouTube, and the aged power forward witnessed Holmgren’s ascension with gray in his goatee.

Their mutual appreciation was palpable. Soon after, it put them in the gym together.

They practiced everything — post game, turnaround jumpers, face-up moves. Holmgren snapped through drills with the fire that All-Stars have recognized and coaches have lauded. But this was the Garnett School of Big Men, with exclusive enrollment and lessons offered by a guy who headbutted stanchions and talked opponents into insanity.

Holmgren always felt his flame burned hottest, that its heights were incapable of being matched or quenched among any crowd. For once, he felt his fire be diminished.

“That (expletive) was sweating more than me and he was running the workout,” Holmgren recalled. “He’s animated, he’s juiced up. I was damn near getting intimidated just off his presence.”

Holmgren is stubborn, though. He’s come too far, worked too hard. He’ll nod and buck back before he ever looks up at his predecessors in awe. He wants to be a legend, too.

Holmgren’s sprint toward greatness has legs. His nod for Friday’s NBA Rising Stars game and his necessary role on one of the league’s brightest powerhouses prove that. But that journey is seemingly eternal. It won’t end with Garnett or Kevin Durant or anyone; It’s likely no stamp of approval will ever seal the path. Holmgren is busy sourcing the traits for the long game.

His way of getting there includes aligning himself with a player like Garnett. By being stone-faced in a standoff with greatness. Greatness like that of Durant, whose signature shoes Holmgren toggles between and whom he notably admired growing up.

Holmgren worked out with Durant in the same summer, seeing the inner workings of the 14-time All-Star and former Thunder legend up close. The repetitions, the infinite swishes of the net that seemingly blend together, the refinement that created perfection.

“The way he's working out now is the same way he's been working out for the last 20 years,” Holmgren said.

Holmgren’s internal gears don’t need an external tweak; they haven’t for a while. In seeking the game’s greatest players, he only wants to see what it takes to reach where he hopes he’s headed.

“Obviously they've had huge success and everything but I'm more looking at, 'How can I learn from these dudes?' more than like, 'Man, I'm so excited that (I) can have a conversation with him,’” Holmgren said.

He called more stars, he shared more gyms. Holmgren left that day with Garnett hungrier.

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Meet Chet Holmgren, the ‘perfectionist’

An hour before the Thunder plays the Celtics in its first game of the new year, Holmgren is going through his pregame routine, shooting from the right corner. He rattles off a few more misses than usual.

He shoots again. This time, he knows. As the ball spins toward another miss, he jerks his head and mouths an expletive.

He waddles to the free-throw line. He readies his stance, he flicks his wrist. Nope. His eyes roll back before he steps away.

Minutes later, he botches a pick-and-pop opportunity. By now, the Earth feels like it's off axis. His displeasures grow louder before hurrying into the next shot. Then he misses a few more 3s before lashing out at his feet.

After he finishes his workout, shaking hands with those who helped him, he asks for the ball back — something he does almost every game. He fiddles with it, pounds it with one hand, then wrestles it in his grasp on his way to the locker room, almost as if to make amends with it. He’s in another world as he passes the clamoring fans that hang over the tunnel. The discussion is too intense.

Holmgren spent his January in a lot of those mental back-and-forths. His efficiency was down from the lofty heights that upheld his Rookie of the Year campaign. Amid a historically grueling point in the season, teams adjusted to him. More than ever, he began hesitating.

His pump fake before 3-point attempts became routine. Excessive, even. Shots that had been no-brainers earlier in the season were paired with second guesses. Decisions he’d seen with a clear eye grew murky.

He mulled it over. Then he acknowledged it head on.

“As a perfectionist, you always want to make the play,” Holmgren said. “Sometimes you're so focused on trying to make every single shot that you start thinking too much about the one single shot. Guys take thousands of shots every season. Nobody makes all of them. I’ve just gotta understand that.”

In his chase for sublimity, Holmgren has been forced to wrap his head around his own fallibility. The way Batman’s Bane was born and raised in darkness, Holmgren dwelled around flaw.

Jalen Suggs still remembers the goofy cargo shorts a young Holmgren rocked when he first watched him hoop in middle school. Holmgren hadn’t yet sprouted beyond doorways or filled out his caricature of a frame. He was just a hopeless, uncoordinated kid who couldn’t catch passes while the team ran the three-man weave in practice.

“I looked at ‘em crazy,” the Orlando Magic guard who also played at Gonzaga recalled of his former teammate at Minnehaha Academy. “We looked around like, ‘What are we doing? What is this dude in the gym with us for?’”

There was a time when Holmgren hadn’t been so deeply in love. He hadn’t yet devoted hours and days and years to basketball. The game was “just a fun thing” for him then.

“Everybody gave me (expletive) for not taking it serious enough,” Holmgren said. “But once it clicked for me, it really clicked for me.”

With that came failure. Shakily learning to move with grace with stilts for limbs, memorizing how his string-bean arms would launch the ball into the rim, familiarizing himself with the shade of the bruises his bird chest would need to absorb.

“When I first started playing, all I did was fail,” Holmgren said. “It's not like I picked up a basketball and was the next coming of Michael Jordan. I was terrible. All I did was fail until I got it right. And that's gonna continue. None of the greatest players ever have ever not failed. It's part of it. And that's not just basketball, it's life.”

Failure has been pinned on him since he picked up a ball. It was an expectation even after — perhaps especially after — stretching into his 7-foot figure and inheriting superhuman abilities. Holmgren was soft until elbows flew and he was ripping his lip from his braces during high school games. He was unskilled and clumsy until people eventually saw his handle and jumper. He was a myth until proven otherwise.

Any accusations of being weak were always shots at his frame, never his will. His competitive edge never squandered. In games, his eyes almost always tell the same story.

“I just always grew up super stubborn,” Holmgren said. “Like, never wanting to let somebody get one over on me. And then also just being taught growing up, if you're gonna play like a punk, you're not gonna be on the floor.”

After years of trial and error, of frustration and attachment, it’s difficult to question his love for the game. He’s the type to keep a basketball on his hip, almost as essential as his wallet or keys. In Holmgren’s end-of-year exit interview last season, he fielded questions with a ball in his lap. And later, as he faced his return, he was baffled that people questioned his desire to play defense in the pro-am game that ended his rookie season before it started.

Despite the mortal spells he saw in January, his assessment only brought into question how obsessive he is over success. Not just his, but the Thunder’s.

Oklahoma City’s rapid rise to contention for the West’s first seed is, in large part, due to his added presence. The weight that comes with being the anchor of a brewing NBA juggernaut exceeds what Holmgren’s scrawny shoulders were meant to carry this early.

All of it seemingly weighs on him. The responsibility could capsize any normal ship.

Thunder coach Mark Daigneault has seen otherwise this season. In the way Holmgren has invited drivers into his lair, getting dunked on just as many times as he’s flattened shot attempts. In swallowing shotmaking slumps. In bluntly framing how little he’s done relative to the career he wants to carve.

“He’s got a unique ability to embrace competition for a guy that’s got a lot to lose,” Daigneault said. “He’s got a reputation, he’s the second pick. And yet he leans into everything. He leans into every challenge and risks failure.

“Winners are willing to fail. The mark of a loser is that you hide, not that you don’t fail. He doesn’t hide.”

Holmgren won’t merely accept fallibility. He acknowledges its coexistence in his world, and he expects its inevitable guest appearances.

“You're gonna (expletive) up 'til you get it right,” Holmgren said. “You just gotta (expletive) up enough that eventually, you get it right.”

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Chet Holmgren vs. ‘human nature’

The word “rookie” evokes indifference in Holmgren. The phrase “award race” triggers denial.

By chance, he’s been caught in the crosshairs of one of the most volatile Rookie of the Year races in recent memory. The injury that sidelined Holmgren the summer he was drafted just happened to align his debut with that of basketball’s next appointed face, San Antonio Spurs rookie Victor Wembanyama. Pitchforks are raised and mobs grow rowdy when debating which of the two spawned furthest from Earth.

With every suggestion of the taboo four-letter acronym, Holmgren’s programming overrides. His calculated but at times raw responses turn premeditated. His dry wit becomes robotic.

The android-esque responses aren’t accompanied by the need to find John Connor. Holmgren only cares to deflect any unnecessary attention from himself and the Thunder. During OKC’s trip to San Antonio in late January, in batting down yet another Wembanyama question, Holmgren pointed his finger at media conglomerates for breathing life into a rivalry the two have publicly tried to suffocate.

Then, he slipped. The fierce competitor in Holmgren admitted Wembanyama exists somewhere in the depths of his mind.

“It's obviously, like, human nature,” said Holmgren, asked if he ever thinks of the matchup. “But to really be uncommon and not just do whatever else does, you have to kind of fight that.”

Few players his age would be so transparent about a rivalry that’s had an overwhelming imprint on their season the way it has with Holmgren. Those emotions portray vulnerability. They welcome the scrutiny that comes with being anything less than guarded. And they exist beneath Holmgren’s monotone shell and naturally glazed expression.

As much as some of Holmgren’s responses can feel preceded by the push of a button, he doesn’t dance around what he feels strongly about. The game he once could unconditionally love without judgment now comes with external caveats.

Thunder general manager Sam Presti calls these things silent forces. But Holmgren’s are deafening.

Most are out of his control. Like being the No. 2 overall pick in the 2022 NBA Draft. Or being pinned against a world-shattering titan. Or being labeled a unicorn in a sport composed of folkloric figures. Some are well within his grasp, like the attention that comes with looking into a camera around the time he was drafted and telling anyone watching that he’d be the best player in the NBA in a matter of months.

Holmgren has developed the maturity to shuffle through them. Not to be binded by them, but to decide which, if any, he’ll give thought to. To invite them, if he wishes.

His reality is distorted. He’s technically a rookie. When his existence alters another player’s legacy, it’s argued that he isn’t. Holmgren himself seemingly doesn’t care for the label. He’s turned his chin at what an average rookie would bury their head in.

He hasn’t lived like a civilian in years. At 15, Holmgren was already 7-foot. At 16, a city knew his name. At 17, he crossed up Stephen Curry. Then the world knew his name. Then his issues and accomplishments were for public digestion.

He’s learned how to carry himself under a microscope, an eye that’s only grown more attentive as he’s leveled up. Holmgren’s deflection of questions about Wembanyama isn’t just a product of Presti’s bootcamp. A chunk of it is from studying the way great players before him conducted themselves.

“I don't even want to say this because it'd be taken the wrong way, but I want to move like a gangster. Like LeBron (James), the way he moves, that's gangster to me,” Holmgren said. “He don't (expletive) around. He has all his people with him. They handle their business, he handles his. And they go about things the right way. You never hear nothing wrong about them in the social media world and in the ESPN world, none of that.

“Just watching that (and) trying to move similar is super important because at the end of the day, nothing off the court can hurt you more than the distractions of (expletive) around and having something goofy happen. With how focused I am on the court, I don't want to take away from that by doing something stupid.”

With his disposition, there are things he’s been able to keep from the world’s omniscient view. Walls he can uphold that shield off necessary parts of himself which he likely feels he needs to protect. Among them, he secures his reasons why.

“I’m intrinsically motivated, for sure,” Holmgren said. “I’m externally motivated in ways, too, but that’s for me to know. … I don’t speak on my motivations.”

What is it that might fuel Holmgren?

The idea of an award that might not have ever been destined for his possession? The gratification in dispelling notions about his game? About who he is? Of whether he needs to feast like a viking and weigh like a lineman to put a dent in this league?

Or maybe the question he has wondered himself: What’s the path for Holmgren to become an NBA star?

As he sits along the sideline of the Thunder’s practice facility, he ponders what it means for the game’s legends to embrace him this early. And perhaps in the same moment, he questions the meaning of his chase.

Beyond his addiction to the game, so much of what Holmgren has searched for — what he needs to step toward greatness has been in him all along. He answers the question without asking. His mind drifts.

“I think about all this stuff all the time, like with the legacies and all the big-time names and dudes who came before me,” Holmgren said. “I met (Tracy McGrady) outside in L.A. on my way to dinner, said, 'What's up?’ It was all love, he gave me some wisdom. Met KG, all these dudes. And I've never bumped into these dudes and been like — obviously, it's respect because I know what they've done, and I'm trying to chase that too — but I've never found myself starstruck, looking at these dudes or like fanned out or anything.

“Because I see that in myself, too.”

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This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: OKC Thunder rookie Chet Holmgren is chasing 'pinnacle' of perfection