The story of the night. As Topic checked in, the OKC crowd got on its feet and loudly applauded his NBA debut. You don’t need to be a basketball sicko to know how mountainous the moment was. After being added with the No. 12 pick of the 2024 NBA draft, the 20-year-old finally logged a stat.

The Oklahoma City Thunder might’ve limped into the NBA All-Star break with a 110-93 loss to the Milwaukee Bucks, but that didn’t take away from Topic’s special night.

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Topic finished with two points on 1-of-3 shooting, one assist and one rebound. He shot 0-of-2 from 3.

Meh. Whatever. What he did on the court didn’t matter. We can worry about his basketball fit some other day — although he did show some tantalizing things with his jumper and playmaking. Just so cool that Topic was able to make his NBA debut three months after he was diagnosed with testicular cancer.

On top of missing all of last season with a torn ACL, Topic has had such an extraordinarily difficult journey to get to this point. When the Thunder announced his cancer diagnosis, the entire NBA world rallied around him. Completing his chemotherapy just last month, he’s had quite the speedrun to get to this point.

Over the last month, Topic had participated in pregame warmups and the occasional practice. Earlier this week, he played a back-to-back for the G League’s OKC Blue, signaling he was on the verge of a return. Now that he’s checked off that milestone, he can finally flip the page and prioritize his basketball journey to the top of his life.

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Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault went into detail about Topic’s return. Since his cancer diagnosis, he’s admirably talked about his fortitude to stay strong despite such a scary development. Now, both sides are happy his cancer treatment is behind him.

“Just thrilled for him. He’s obviously been through a ton of adversity in his life the last couple of years. He’s a young guy who all he wants to do is play basketball, and that’s been taken from him a couple of different times. For him to work himself to this point and get himself on the floor is a great accomplishment,” Daigneault said. “I loved watching the team respond to him both during and after the game. I can’t help but think of his family as well. I have young kids at home. It’s pretty hard to even think about what his family’s gone through as well. It hasn’t just been him. He’s got a wonderful family that loved him very much, that was through this with him the entire time. So I’m thrilled for them and certainly a really good feel-good night for his family, for him and for our team.”

Now that we’ve seen Topic on the floor, it’ll be interesting to see how the rest of the season looks for him. Honestly surprised in a good way that he suited up this year. Thought the Thunder might’ve waited until next year to finally make his NBA debut. Despite some flashes, Daigneault pumped the brakes on his ability to help out the title contender right now.

“What chemotherapy does to your body is really remarkable. It’s crazy what it does to you physically. So the road back from that is different for everybody and it’s highly challenging,” Daigneault said. “If his peak athleticismis a 10 out of 10, he’s not even close to that right now in terms of conditioning, athleticism, strength, all the things that that does to your body. It would be unfair to evaluate him in this context. We’re just happy he got out there tonight and is on that track back. That’s the most important thing.”

This article originally appeared on OKC Thunder Wire: Thunder ‘thrilled’ to see Nikola Topic make NBA debut in loss to Bucks