3 ways Chet Holmgren’s injury impacts OKC Thunder 2022-23 season
By Rylan Stiles
With Chet Holmgren out for the season, Mark Daigneault will have to rewrite his rotation and shake up his planned starting lineup
The Oklahoma City Thunder have spent all offseason riding a high. From leaping up in the NBA Draft lottery to grab the 2nd overall pick, to trading multiple future first-round picks in exchange for the 11th pick and keeping the 12th overall pick owed to them by the Clippers. Just last week basketball was buzzing in Bricktown.
Bringing in three lottery picks, four total rookies, re-signing Lu Dort and Kenrich Williams to long-term extensions, and looking forward to another year of progression from Josh Giddey and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was on the horizon. Just a month away!
Now, all of that comes to a stretching halt with the news that Chet Holmgren will miss his entire rookie season, just as NBA stars before him. Like Joel Embiid, who missed his first two seasons, Ben Simmons who missed his entire rookie year, and Blake Griffin who suffered the same fate. Even Zion Williamson missed an entire year of his NBA career a season ago.
The biggest impact of this injury is the immediate future. Let’s be honest, none of us are doctors and we will simply all play the results. Either Holmgren gets hurt again and we all retroactively freak out and point back to this injury as the downfall, or he never suffers another serious injury and this is just a footnote on his basketball reference page.
The largest impact this news has on the season, is not necessarily the win total. Sure, the Thunder will lose more games without Holmgren but how many more wins does he create? Three? Four? five? ten? The impact here is the rotation.
Even for a team projected to be in the bottom half of the lottery this upcoming season, the Thunder are heading for a massive roster crunch, and before this injury, it was hard to find minutes for every player.
Now, 30 minutes a night just freed up and this drops the number of locked-in starters from four to three.
The locked-in starters remain Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Josh Giddey, and Lu Dort. Past that? It is anyone’s guess.
Jalen Williams, Aleksej Pokusevski, Ousmane Dieng, and Jaylin Williams are set to see the biggest minute upticks due to this news.
For Jalen Williams, it would not shock me to see him sneak his way into the starting lineup with two spots up for grabs. He was already in line to grab at least 20 minutes a night, but this news puts him in line to be the highest minutes per game rookie on the roster.
Now that Chet Holmgren is not getting 30 minutes a game allocated to him, I think more if not all of those will go to “projects” like trying to develop Aleksej Pokusevski and Ousmane Dieng at the NBA level. For Jaylin Williams, who else is going to play in the middle? Derrick Favors, Mike Muscala, Jeremiah Robinson-Earl, and Darius Bazley are the only other players that could play that position. That list includes two forwards and two veterans that can not handle a heavy workload at this point in their careers.