The Chet Holmgren hype train needs to recalibrate
And before it's too late.
There’s just no way anybody believes this:
First off, LeBron was the most sure-fire, sure-thing NBA prospect of my lifetime, your lifetime, and your grandparents’ too. The hype was stupendous. It completely changed how we value high school recruits, and how grassroots basketball is marketed, for the rest of time.
Secondly, did we forget this happened the other night?
I like to think those of you who subscribe to this newsletter can appreciate confidence that borders on cockiness. It’s often part of the athlete’s mindset. Holmgren is also unlike any NBA rookie we’ve ever seen, a 7-foot-1 shot-blocker with a point guard skillset who drains threes so naturally that he almost looks bored when firing them off.
That’s all given way to a mound of hype that put him under a microscope as a high school phenom, and now seems to flirt with being unreasonable, even insurmountable.
But he seems to be OK with fanning the flames. Back in the spring, when asked who the best player in the NBA is, he said “Me in two months.”
Problem with that: He wasn’t even the best player on his team this season at Gonzaga. He also underwhelmed at times in the NCAA tournament.
Hey, you might say, nobody was more confident than Michael Jordan. Right. But Jordan was also the reigning National Player of the Year at the time he was drafted. Chet Holmgren wasn’t even his own conference’s player of the year.
He’s also going to need a new weight training regimen. Matt Taibbi summed it up best in his NBA draft column last year, with this observation about how you have better chances with a heavy player who can lose weight, rather than a skinny player who struggles to put on weight:
Fat, not skinny: A heavy player can lose weight, but there’s nothing you can do to Shawn Bradley to keep his matchups with Shaquille O’Neal from turning into nature show videos. In fairness that was true of a lot of players, but the current rules, which don’t allow pushback from defenders, really hurt the kind of player who flies backward when hit with driving Harden-ass in the lane. Within a month last year poor 7’0”, 190-pound Aleksej Pokusevski was stopping when he got to the hoop to see if anyone maybe wanted to sock him before he took a layup. He shot 34% from the field. Maybe he’ll come around, but mostly those players don’t last. Meanwhile, fat skilled guys not infrequently become less fat, and good, like under-drafted players Marc Gasol, Big Baby Davis, Boris Diaw, etc.
Further case in point: ex-fat kid and reigning two-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokic, still playfully called the “Dad Bod God” even after his radical body transformation.
And let’s not kid ourselves. Chet is a beanpole. He may blow away in the next Oklahoma prairie tornado. And until he fixes that, or unless the plan is for him to hang out along the wings for all eternity, he could get eaten alive. Just wait until someone like Giannis gets a piece of him.
I just wonder if this is all too much too soon for a kid who may end up just being a perfectly serviceable Peja Stojakovic (which, by the way, nothing wrong with that).
There’s obviously a treasure trove of upside to like about him. But at what cost?
And as for Kenneth Lofton Jr., who apparently bears no relation to Cleveland Indians legend Kenny Lofton (bummer), sign me up. I want Part 50.