Chet Holmgren made his long-awaited return to the basketball court on Monday, with the seven-footer showing off his range of skills for the Oklahoma City Thunder in their Salt Lake City Summer League opener.
The number-two overall pick in 2022 was robbed of his rookie year by a Lisfranc injury he suffered during a pro-am game in August 2022 but OKC fans were delighted to see him back on the floor in a 95-85 victory over the Utah Jazz at Delta Center.
Holmgren was rusty in the first quarter as he went scoreless and threw up a few ugly airballs, but he soon found his grove and ended the night with 15 points, nine rebounds, four blocks and two assists.
Fair questions will be raised about the level of competition with the lineups filled with youngsters mainly battling for a place on the roster when the NBA season gets underway in October.
But Holmgren's performance on Monday was a huge step in the right direction for the former Gonzaga star who was forced to watch the entirety of last season from the sidelines after impressing in last year's Summer League.
"The last thing I wanted to do was come out here and be timid, so I wanted to come out of the gates and be aggressive and look to impact the game," Holmgren told ESPN after his comeback.
"Obviously with that, you can make mistakes or miss shots, and that's part of the game. Whether you've just played a hundred straight games without missing one or missed the whole season, mistakes come with the game, and I just got to learn from them."
A Lisfranc injury is uncommon in basketball and occurs when one or more of the metatarsal bones in the foot becomes displaced, causing ligament damage.
Holmgren was the star player on a Gonzaga team that was the top seed for the NCAA Tournament in 2022, but they were stunned in the Sweet 16 by Arkansas and the 21-year-old declared for the NBA Draft.
Injury has forced the center to wait for his moment but he believes his injury woes are behind him and he is ready to make up for lost time in the year ahead.
"The foot feels great," Holmgren added. "It's like the injury never happened, other than everything I had to go through obviously. But at this point, if you erased my memory, I wouldn't know that anything had happened to my foot other than the scars from surgery.
"But conditioning-wise, there's millions of hurdles that you have to go through in the process of returning to play. Not being able to play a game for a year, it's really, really hard to test and see where you are."
Holmgren also made an impression on his teammates with Josh Giddey taking to social media, responding to a Thunder fan account tweet stating that your phone's battery life was Holmgren's odds of winning Rookie of the Year, Giddey quoted with the words 'my phone's fully charged.'
