LAS VEGAS — Red Velvet entered DaRon Holmes II’s life at the perfect time, or so he thought.
She was a goldendoodle puppy, her fur a shade of auburn that reminded Holmes of his mother’s baking. A culinary arts teacher by day, Tomika Holmes also sculpts and sells extravagant cakes as a side hustle. DaRon grew up on her red velvet.
He hasn’t exactly inherited her talent for gastronomy — “he’s a good DoorDasher,” his dad wisecracked — but Holmes figured if he couldn’t recreate the cake on his own, at least he could name his new therapy dog after it.
“Honestly, it didn’t help,” he said. “But you know, I love that dog. She’s a lot to deal with. I have to deal with her every day. She is a lot. It’s hard raising them. It’s like raising a kid. I think, ‘Why did I get a dog?’ But I’m very grateful for that dog, and I love her to death.”
Fortunately, Red Velvet is more fully grown now. She was a small pup when Holmes adopted her last year, seeking ways to navigate an unprecedented physical and mental obstacle. While Red Velvet grew, his basketball career was frustratingly on hold.
Holmes’ NBA Summer League debut encountered a cruel denouement on July 12, 2024, when he tore his right Achilles tendon late in the fourth quarter of a promising performance. His rookie season ended in an instant, two weeks after the Nuggets traded three second-round picks to draft him 22nd overall.
This weekend marked the reintroduction of Holmes, the first step toward a proper rookie year. He played his first game since the injury on Thursday at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Cox Pavilion — the same intimate, balmy auxiliary gym where concerned teammates and coaches once crowded around him. With 15 points, he made a triumphant return to the scene of the crime.
Holmes’ mindset while rehabbing from perhaps the most feared injury in professional basketball was always similar to that of his goldendoodle: upbeat and unshaken.
“I was met by a sense of determination and optimism on his part,” said Holmes’ business manager Mitch Brown, who’s been watching him play basketball since he was a child. “It really struck me that his mentality as a 22-year-old kid was so strong, dealing with something like this.”
The night it happened was all the more gut-wrenching for its unfamiliarity. Raised in Phoenix, refined over three years at Dayton University, Holmes had never sustained a major health setback. He fractured a bone once in high school, but it didn’t keep him away from basketball for long.
Family traveled to Las Vegas in droves for his 2024 Summer League opener. About 15 relatives were in attendance at Cox Pavilion, plus Holmes’ high school coaches, his agents and an assortment of family friends.
DaRon Holmes Sr. assumed his son had twisted an ankle when he went down. “We expected him to pop back up and kind of limp and get his feet under him,” he said. “But when we saw the way he was walking and not really able to flex that foot, we got more concerned.”
Team doctors tended to Holmes under the bleachers in a corner of the gym as Denver’s game resumed. It ended only a few minutes later. But in the meantime, relatives could only guess the severity of the injury by observing the facial expressions of Nuggets personnel. Holmes Sr. saw Calvin Booth, the teams’ general manager at the time, emerge from the medical area and walk straight out of the gym, visibly upset.
That’s when he knew, even before the text arrived from DaRon’s agent confirming the suspected diagnosis.
“It just felt like I swallowed my heart,” Holmes Sr. said. “Like my heart just fell into my stomach.”
Brown was ironically one of the few family members not in the building. In addition to working with Holmes on NIL deals at Dayton, Brown is Tomika Holmes’ cousin. He was still at his home in Charlotte that night, watching on television with plans to fly out to Vegas for the next few games.
“I was beating myself up,” he said.
Yet Holmes has testified throughout the last year that he wasn’t discouraged. He tried to take the news in stride. He returned to Denver and underwent surgery. When his mom visited a couple of weeks later, she encountered her son in an almost recklessly optimistic state.
“He had a (medical) scooter, and one time he was scooting so fast he fell off the thing, because he was just so ready to get back out there,” Tomika Holmes said. “He’s scooting around downtown Denver, and then trying to take (care of) the goldendoodle puppy. He was like, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine, I’ve got this.’ That’s kind of his whole spirit.”
Holmes admits partial defeat in hindsight, though: “I was thinking (Red Velvet) would help me with smiling throughout the day. But I was helping her a lot more than she was helping me.”
Still, as months passed, he continued to progress with a cheerful mindset that even he finds difficult to explain. Brown believes it could be that Achilles tears are becoming so common among NBA players that they’re increasingly recognizing it as a fact of life, rather than a devastating blow to their careers.
Tomika Holmes thinks it could be that Red Velvet did help, despite the inconveniences.
“When you’re going through rehab, and you see other people, your team out there playing and everything, it’s nice to come home to someone who loves you unconditionally,” she said.
Maybe it also helped to have family visiting Ball Arena throughout the year and supporting Holmes as if he were playing. Tomika Holmes would look for him at the end of the bench and send photos of him in a family group chat: “We spotted him! He’s there!”
Holmes’ dad thinks it could be that past disappointments trained him to persist through adversity. DaRon was a manager, not a player, on a team in middle school once. He got cut from multiple AAU rosters.
“I didn’t even really know if I was gonna play basketball,” Holmes said. “I was gonna play overseas. But now I’m here. It’s been a long process. So I just try to stay positive. You never know where you’ll end up.”
Then there was the stealthy silver lining that lingered around Holmes’ entire recovery process, lending a reason to feel oddly grateful.
“That same injury could have happened a month earlier. Two weeks earlier,” Holmes Sr. said. “What would have happened if it had happened before the draft?”
The rehab timeline went smoothly. It started with ankle mobility work, then mild calf exercises and a boot. Then Holmes was out of the boot. By December, he was running again and going through pregame shooting workouts. He tried to get up 200 or more 3-pointers daily, unless trainers told him he needed to rest.
Back in July 2024, his surgeon had told him that he could feasibly be back in playing shape the following March.
That was never the goal, though. Holmes understood that he would be out the entire season, including the playoffs.
“Everything was about being ready to come back and play at this time,” Holmes Sr. said.
Summer League, again.
“This is round 2,” Brown said. “A restart at the place where this went left last year. I think it’s meaningful.”
Brown flew into Las Vegas the day before Denver’s first game this time, not wanting to leave anything up to chance — to the whims of airline schedules or summer storm patterns between North Carolina and Nevada. “DaRon’s probably not,” he said, “but I’m a little superstitious.”
Holmes’ parents and agents were back in the building as well, beaming at the sight of him simply running the floor, launching 3s, even making situational mistakes. He did all of it with the enthusiasm of a goldendoodle.
Red Velvet resides in Arizona with DaRon Sr. and Tomika at the moment. Holmes drove to Phoenix with the dog after the Nuggets’ 2024-25 season ended, and she has stayed there since. Whether she stays or returns to Denver could become a dispute. Holmes thinks he’s getting her back soon, but his mom has other ideas.
“I’ve grown quite attached to her,” Tomika Holmes said, “so I don’t know what’s going to happen with the dog.”
After all, Holmes has a rookie season to play.
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