How will the Thunder navigate Chet Holmgren's absence?

The pelvic fracture Chet Holmgren suffered in the first quarter of Sunday night's showdown with the Warriors, which will sideline the 22-year-old phenom for at least eight weeks, is a bummer for numerous reasons.

First and foremost, the injury derails the sophomore season of one of the most exciting young players in the NBA - a guy who was arguably the early front-runner for Defensive Player of the Year - which feels especially dispiriting considering he lost his entire would-be rookie campaign to a foot injury two years ago. Secondarily, it makes things a lot more challenging in the near term for the league's most exciting young team, the Western Conference favorite whose defense flashed historic potential while the 7-foot-1 Holmgren was part of it.

With Oklahoma City Thunder centers Isaiah Hartenstein and Jaylin Williams also on the shelf for at least another couple of weeks, there are now zero available big men on the roster (depending on how you'd classify 21-year-old tweener Ousmane Dieng). Longtime small-ball five Kenrich Williams was finally able to make his season debut Monday night in a spirited win over the Clippers, but this is not how things were supposed to go for the Thunder. They came into the season sporting a new two-big frontcourt that figured to alter the contours of their playing style. Then Hartenstein broke his hand during preseason, and now OKC is consigned to playing micro-ball until he gets back. The tallest player in the starting lineup is 6-foot-6 point guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

The good news is that even without a true center (or even anyone power-forward sized) in the mix, the Thunder are deep and super-talented and still have many ways of making opponents' lives miserable. If any team is set up to thrive playing small full time, it's OKC. That's partly because most Thunder guards and wings are huge for their positions, be they long and spindly like Gilgeous-Alexander, broad and brawny like Jalen Williams, or built like a brick shithouse a la Lu Dort. It's also because Mark Daigneault's inventive system has given those guards and wings a ton of experience doing things that typically fall under the purview of bigs, like screening and rolling in small-small actions or operating out of the dunker spot.

Holmgren is one of the Thunder's best shooters, so it's not like their spacing will be better without him. They'll miss his cutting, interior scoring, pick-and-pop prowess, and trail threes in transition. But they'll still be a pain in the ass to guard, forcing defenses to cover acres of space with all their speed, relentless driving, off-ball movement, and unpredictable actions in which anyone on the floor can be a screener.

The defensive end is where more cracks will appear in the Thunder's facade as they try to jerry-rig a functional structure without a big-man foundation. They surrendered 126.9 points per 100 possessions over their last two games (in which they played small-ball for 91 of 96 minutes), compared to 97.3 beforehand. And while the qualitative difference obviously isn't nearly that stark - their opponents shot the lights out from 3-point range in those two games after being frigid from downtown for the nine games prior - those numbers aren't meaningless.

Process-wise, the Thunder will continue to fly around, pressure the hell out of the ball, jump gaps, and force a metric ton of turnovers. Monday's game, when they turned the Clippers over an astonishing 23 times, presented the possibility that they could lean even harder into that aspect of their identity since they now have one less bulwark - the elite rim protection that Holmgren alone provided - to rely on. At the same time, amping up the pressure is a risky gambit without Holmgren as a safety net.

The consequence of the Thunder's constant pressure is that they allow the league's sixth-highest rate of opponent rim shots. But it's one thing to allow all those short-range attempts when their defense is backstopped by Holmgren's 9-foot-6 standing reach, and another to do so when their last line of defense is a 6-foot-something guard. Holmgren was contesting more rim shots per game than any player in the league before his injury and holding opponents to 42.9% on those shots. (Only Victor Wembanyama was better among high-volume challengers.) OKC's defensive field-goal percentage inside the restricted area is nearly 10 percentage points higher with Holmgren on the bench, per Cleaning the Glass.

OKC's coverage plan against both Steph Curry and James Harden was to either blitz or switch-and-double them, forcing the ball to shakier decision-makers who would be more liable to throw it away. Again, there's some sense in that, but consider this possession from Sunday's game against Golden State:

With Alex Caruso guarding the screener (Jonathan Kuminga), that could easily have been a switch, with no advantage conceded. Instead, the Warriors were able to counter the blitz by shorting the pick-and-roll, with Curry advancing the ball to Draymond Green, who immediately hit the diving Kuminga for a dunk. Isaiah Joe made a point of switching spots with the smaller Cason Wallace so he could be in low help position, and Gilgeous-Alexander even arrived (albeit a beat late) as a second tagger. They still didn't have a chance.

Interestingly, the Thunder don't concede more rim shots without Holmgren on the floor. They aim to protect the rim by committee when they play small, with at least two and often three defenders converging on the paint to swallow up a driver or roller, rather than trusting Holmgren to handle those threats with minimal help. But what does happen when he's on the bench? They concede many, many more corner threes.

It's not hard to understand the correlation: More bodies in the middle equals more open shooters on the perimeter. OKC's opponent corner 3-point attempt rate with Holmgren on the floor (8.6%) is equivalent to the sixth-lowest rate in the league; with him on the bench (14.8%), it's the highest by a mile, per Cleaning the Glass.

And for a team that struggled to rebound the ball even with Holmgren healthy, losing their best rebounder (until Hartenstein returns) makes it that much tougher to end possessions even when those open corner threes rim out:

It's still way too early to say whether the Thunder need to change anything, like dialing back their aggression or plucking a stopgap center off the scrap heap. They'll get burned by the long ball on some nights, but that doesn't mean their approach is wrong. Shooting is highly variable from game to game, but if you can consistently take possessions away from your opponents - as the Thunder have proven they can - that gives you an element of stability. It also gives you a major boost at the other end, since live-ball turnovers are the best way to generate efficient offense.

So, yes, Holmgren's injury is tough for him, his team, and the NBA at large. On top of the short-term setback, it leaves the Thunder waiting at least two more months to get a look at the Holmgren-Hartenstein pairing. But in the meantime, OKC will continue to be one of the most stylistically unique teams in the league, and it will be fascinating to watch them respond to this challenge.

Joe Wolfond covers the NBA for theScore.