Milwaukee prioritizes protecting the rim at all costs (even if it means giving up a metric ton of threes), and Jrue’s ability to thwart opposing drivers at the point of attack plays nearly as important a role in those efforts as the looming help defense of Antetokounmpo and Brook Lopez. Holiday is a menace on the ball, working beautifully within Milwaukee’s system to prevent ventures into the paint. For example, among the 154 players who have played 1,000 or more minutes this season, Holiday ranks fifth in Bball-Index’s Matchup Difficulty statistic, which utilizes NBA.com’s matchup data to combine the average usage rate and average offensive impact (as measured by LEBRON) of a defender’s halfcourt matchups to determine their average strength of matchup. Holiday is typically tasked with defending those types of guys for every one of his 31.7 minutes a night. Those are all vastly different types of players, with the commonality being that they are their team’s most dangerous perimeter threat.
Holiday has been the team’s primary defender on everyone from Damian Lillard to Kawhi Leonard, LeBron James to James Harden, Jayson Tatum to De’Aaron Fox and Luka Dončić to Bradley Beal. That’s borne out in the league’s matchup data. His range of ability to guard different types of players is about as unique as I’ve seen.” “He takes the toughest matchups every night,” Budenholzer said in December. He’s one of the NBA’s premier defenders, and the Bucks trust him to guard perimeter players of all stripes. Of course, offense is arguably not even Holiday’s best asset. Stats for Jrue Holiday and the Milwaukee Bucks during the 2020-21 season with Giannis Antetokounmpo on and off the court Jrue lifts his game without Giannis on the court Bucks coach Mike Budenholzer has tended to keep Antetokounmpo on his usual rest and rotation schedule while rotating Holiday and Middleton a bit more haphazardly, and Holiday has not appeared bothered by it in the slightest. Holiday’s adjustment to playing alongside Giannis Antetokounmpo and Khris Middleton has barely seemed like an adjustment at all. 4 It’s typically folly to put all that much stock in any one of these numbers or another, but when they’re all saying the same thing, it’s not a bad idea to listen. He ranks 17th in FiveThirtyEight’s total RAPTOR, 21st in ESPN’s Real Plus-Minus, 24th in Box Plus-Minus, 29th in Win Shares per 48 minutes, 31st in Value Over Replacement Player and 39th in Bball-Index’s LEBRON. His two-way impact has been remarkably strong, with nearly every all-in-one metric painting Holiday as a top-30 overall player this season. The team is 27-11 in games he’s played and just 5-6 in ones he hasn’t, while he’s one of just 14 rotation players 3 whose team has a net rating of plus-10 or better with him in the game. He missed a 10-game stretch in February due to a bout with COVID-19, but he has otherwise sparkled this season, averaging 17 points, 4.6 rebounds, 5.4 assists and a league-best 1.8 steals per game while shooting 51 percent from the field, 39 percent from three and 82 percent from the line. Holiday had the Bucks over a barrel when it came to extension talks given how much they traded away to secure his services, but it’s not like he hasn’t been everything they thought he would be and more when they made that deal. (Side note: Eastern Conference Player of the Week is probably a pretty nice thing to have as your second-best accomplishment in a given week.) By midday Monday, Holiday was also named as the Eastern Conference Player of the Week for the week that concluded the day he signed that extension, thanks to averaging 26.8 points, 5.8 rebounds, 8.5 assists and 2.5 steals per game across four contests. Over the weekend, Holiday got exactly that when he and the Bucks agreed on a reported four-year, $135 million extension 2 that includes a whopping $36.9 million player option for the 2024-25 season. When the Milwaukee Bucks acquired Jrue Holiday from the New Orleans Pelicans for a package that included three unprotected first-round picks 1 and swap rights on two more, it was not difficult to foresee a massive contract coming Holiday’s way.
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