Denver Nuggets rookie DaRon Holmes II underwent surgery to repair a torn right Achilles, the team announced on Monday. The first-round draft pick is expected to miss the 2024-25 season after he suffered the injury during his NBA Summer League debut on Friday.
The team said more updates on Holmes' status and rehab schedule will be provided at a later date, but it can take up to a full calendar year to recover from a torn Achilles injury.
Denver selected Holmes with the No. 22 overall pick in the NBA Draft, and he was playing quite well before he got hurt. He had scored 11 points and pulled in seven rebounds in 26 minutes of action before getting hurt, but in the second half against the Los Angeles Clippers on Friday, the Nuggets lost their top rookie for the season.
The blow is especially crushing, considering Denver went to great lengths to land the 22-year-old Holmes. He played three seasons at Dayton and averaged 20.4 points and 8.5 rebounds as a junior last year. The Nuggets are relatively light in assets after trading the bulk of their draft capital to build their current roster, so spending three second-round picks to move up for him wasn't cheap.
They did so because they expected Holmes to be a key front-court reserve for them, with the upside of growing into much more. A high-level athlete that can shoot and defend on the perimeter, Holmes likely would have played the majority of his minutes as a power forward early on in his career, but the hope was that he could eventually develop into a reliable backup center behind three-time MVP Nikola Jokic. Mid-level signing Dario Saric will hold that role for now, but the backup center has been a persistent issue for Denver that has been compounded by former first-round pick Zeke Nnaji failing to develop even after getting a rookie extension last offseason.
Holmes may yet solve Denver's backup center problem down the line, but a torn Achilles is among the most devastating injuries an NBA player can sustain. It usually knocks the player out for at least a year, and historically speaking, it tends to affect their athleticism for years to come afterward. Fortunately, the prognosis hasn't been quite as grim lately, with Kevin Durant proving that players can return at something resembling full strength.
Of course, Durant was already among the NBA's best players when he got hurt. Holmes went down in literally his first professional exhibition. Now Holmes has a year of difficult recovery ahead of him just to get back to square one, and the Nuggets are down one key rookie after already losing starting shooting guard Kentavious Caldwell-Pope in free agency.