OKLAHOMA CITY — The talk on the team plane centered on a player the Oklahoma City Thunder had not seen in weeks. All-Star point guard Jamal Murray had gone haywire that late-March evening, dropping a career-best 53 points in Denver while OKC was playing in Boston.Late at night, with the defending champs heading home from Massachusetts and already in the stratosphere, word of Murray’s heroics spread. It didn’t take long for nearly everyone on the team to join the discussion. Fifty-three points. Nine 3-point makes. Murray was on fire.Basketball players are fans of the game they play, too, and they were glowing over a performance most of them had never matched.Then Chet Holmgren entered the conversation.The Thunder center had not been sleeping. He wasn’t stationed in a back seat away from the action. He wasn’t hanging with the coaching staff, who sit in a different section, sequestered from his teammates’ social activity. Yet, he stood up to blurt out a major announcement, one he was certain no one on the plane had yet realized.“Oh!” he yelled. “Jamal Murray had 53! Y’all see that?!”Without hesitation, the Thunder players merged, all cackling simultaneously. Holmgren realized what had happened. It was not his first time zoning out only to enter a conversation without realizing it had already begun. Within seconds, he was giggling just as hard as everyone else.“It’s funny, because it’s Chet,” said Kenrich Williams, one of Holmgren’s closest friends on the Thunder. “That’s Chet. He’s in his own world, man.”That’s Chet, all right.He’s the comedic relief inside an unusually tight locker room that was built organically, either through the draft or with players who were shunned by other organizations and came to Oklahoma City when they were young, only for the franchise to develop them into helpful contributors. He’s the anchor of the NBA’s most smothering defense, the deserving second-place finisher in Defensive Player of the Year voting in 2026. He’s the highly intellectual individual who juxtaposes long diatribes about basketball philosophy, ones where he can identify other teams’ play calls as quickly as Shakespeare could notice iambic pentameter, with aloof gaffes on team planes.He’s been a supplementary option inside OKC’s playoff offense, behind reigning MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in the hierarchy, after All-NBA wing Jalen Williams missed the majority of the regular season and much of the playoffs with injuries.But after Tuesday night’s win, in which Holmgren posted 16 points and 11 rebounds, the defending champion Thunder moved within one victory of a second straight NBA Finals appearance, taking a 3-2 lead over the San Antonio Spurs.Holmgren’s world, the one Kenrich Williams portrays as well as the one reality relays, seems mostly jolly. And Holmgren will back up the sentiment.But the center’s time in Oklahoma City did not have to be so pleasant. Before Holmgren could spring to success, he had to accept being a secondary performer, an uneasy task for any young player who had existed as, for lack of a better term, “the man” — a role he had to learn from the beginning, but one he could never hold in OKC.With 2025 training camp set to begin, Holmgren’s mind had deviated from the NBA. Fresh off his first title, and perhaps with more to come, he showed up at a pickup game hosted by popular YouTube streamer Kai Cenat. The goal wasn’t to play; it was to help a friend.Holmgren knew Cenat’s online following, and he also knew Gilgeous-Alexander had career goals that went beyond racking up trophies: a mission of selling sneakers. And Holmgren was determined to help.With the cameras on him, Holmgren gifted Cenat a pair of Gilgeous-Alexander’s Converses, then FaceTimed his starting point guard into the conversation.It was all part of Holmgren’s plan.Contrary to popular belief, Holmgren rejects the cliché that the greatest teams push egos aside, forgetting individual goals in the quest for a Larry O’Brien Trophy. To him, sacrifice means having the greatest of both worlds.“The best team is the team that has an awareness of each person’s individual goals and helps them get there as a team,” he said earlier this year in a conversation with The Athletic. “Shai is trying to sell shoes; I went on a stream with his shoes. Maybe somebody’s trying to find their rhythm. They’re not really shooting the ball too well. It’s like, let me pass up this (shot), get them a good one. Stuff like that.“Like last year, (Jalen Williams) was really pushing for All-Star, and all of us were like, go get that s—. Like, go vote for him.”Holmgren’s mentality comes from experience, though not many professional players — if any at all — can relate to his situation.ESPN ranked him as the country’s No. 1 recruit when he left high school for Gonzaga in 2021. He did not disappoint in college, eventually becoming the second selection in the 2022 NBA Draft. After a Lisfranc injury sidelined him for his first season, he has lived up to his potential as a pro. If the once-in-a-lifetime Victor Wembanyama did not exist, Holmgren would have won Rookie of the Year. The next spring, Holmgren won his first ring. The following season, this one, he made his first All-Star team and was named an All-NBA third-team selection.