Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Denver’s Summer League team this year was an omission.
Third-year big man DaRon Holmes II has been absent from the sideline in Las Vegas this week, left off the roster. That hasn’t stopped him from hanging out around the team, though. The 2024 first-round pick spent last week practicing with the Summer League Nuggets at their mini camp, and he did make the trip to the desert, where his goal has been to join as many informal pickup runs as he can find.
“My friends always ask me, ‘Why aren’t you playing?’ It wasn’t my decision,” Holmes said. “But at the end of the day, I’m gonna do whatever the coaches ask me to and the front office asks me to. I would love to play, but at the same time, if they’re telling me no, then I’m gonna listen to what they have to say, and I’m gonna get better every day regardless.”
Holmes, who turns 24 next month, has an emotionally complicated history at UNLV’s Cox Pavilion, the site where Denver has played most of its Summer League games in recent years. Two weeks after he was drafted with the 22nd pick, he tore his right Achilles tendon in his Summer League debut, delaying his rookie season and setting back his career in ways that still resonate to this day.
He made a triumphant return to competitive basketball last year in the same gymnasium where he suffered the injury, scoring 15 points in his re-debut. This would have been his second healthy Summer League, a normal step for players at his developmental stage. But Denver’s front office decided he had graduated from the annual showcase for young players.
“He’s been here every day since the season ended,” Nuggets executive vice president of player personnel Jon Wallace said recently. “Working on his shot, working on his conditioning, working on his mobility. He’s a very important factor in terms of his lethal shooting ability. So any time you can do that, you can find a place on the floor. As we continue to develop his game, we’ll see how he fits in with other guys. But we’re very pleased with his development at this point.”
The Nuggets made a point to slow-play his 2025-26 season. They didn’t trust that Holmes could make an immediate impact for a championship contender while coming off such a severe injury, so they sent him down to the G League for large chunks of the year, imploring him to master Denver’s system and spacing. He averaged 20.7 points, 8.3 rebounds and four assists with the Grand Rapids Gold under coach Ryan Bowen, who had previously served as a Nuggets assistant alongside David Adelman.
“Any time you have an injury the way he had it, it goes beyond just the physical,” Wallace said. “So it was in a place where we didn’t want to push him mentally and make sure he trusted his body, felt comfortable, but also (we wanted to) give him the ability to do it as his pace. I think he should be commended for the way he stayed true to it. Because a lot of guys don’t really return to their same form.”
“It used to be an injury where you’re done if you tear your Achilles,” Holmes said. “I think it’s definitely the worst injury you can have playing basketball. But it’s been a full process, and it does take a while. … I’m learning new things about my game. I’m learning how to play without being the most freakish athletic guy. I felt like I was very athletic before. I feel like I still am, but at the same time, I’m learning new things about my game.”
Limiting Holmes’ NBA minutes was a luxury that Denver probably can’t afford again next season. One of the deepest rosters of the Nikola Jokic era has been replaced by the swirling uncertainty of a cap crunch. Assuming Holmes is on the roster in September — if there’s any subtext to his absence from Summer League, it might be the Nuggets’ reluctance to risk damaging anyone’s trade value right now — he’ll be one of the most important players at training camp.
This could be a make-or-break season for his viability in Denver’s rotation, whether as a backup center or power forward. One of his G League missions last year was to learn the dunker spot, he told The Post.
“Maturing, understanding the game a little bit more,” he said. “Knowing where to be, knowing what spots to do. Knowing the plays. But that comes with just being here and getting in the reps.”
And so “being here” remained a priority for Holmes after the season. If he wasn’t going to be on the court at Summer League, he needed to find other ways to prove himself to a front office regime that’s not the same as the one that drafted him. Calvin Booth was his biggest believer in 2024. Now, it’s Wallace, Ben Tenzer and Adelman steering the ship. Holmes also pinpointed his defensive mobility as a top focus this summer.
“I need to be here early. I shouldn’t be going on vacations right now,” he said. “I haven’t proved myself yet. So my goal is to get better every day until I gain trust from my teammates and coaches that I can go out there and compete.
“… When guys come in, especially for Summer League, everybody is trying to earn something. Everybody is trying to get that spot. So everybody is playing hard. For me, that’s what I need to be around, because that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to earn my time on the court. So regardless of wherever anybody’s at in their careers, everybody’s out here busting their tails to get to where they want to be. I think that’s somewhere I need to be around.”
One reason for his confidence: The Nuggets picked up his team option for the 2026-27 season last October, six months after Booth lost his job. The fact that he’s still under contract in Denver was a Wallace and Tenzer decision. Holmes is set to make $3.4 million. He has another team option next summer, before the last year of his rookie-scale deal. If that’s picked up, he’ll carry a $5.5 million cap hit in 2027-28.
In the meantime, he’s still looking for a second glimpse of NBA action. The extent of his real playing time last season was a 10-game stint when Jokic and Jonas Valanciunas were both injured, forcing the Nuggets to call him up and start him.
The most enticing element of that small sample size was Holmes’ confidence as a floor-stretching big. He made 20 of his first 45 career 3-point attempts.
“I like ‘Deuce.’ I wish he was playing (this week), so we could do his pick-and-pop and let him shoot 3s all Summer League,” Nuggets assistant JJ Barea said, laughing. “I told him that in Vegas now, there’s going to be a lot of pickup games, a lot of NBA games randomly. Try to play in all of them so you can get reps in.”
Those reps are the only true remedy for the awkwardness of Holmes’ last two years, he believes.
“After an injury I had like the Achilles, what I had to go through, it’s really no joke,” he said. “Not a lot of people understand that. So I mean, the fact that I’m at where I’m at today, I’m very proud of myself.”
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