The everyday impact of Jrue Holiday

The Celtics needed him to reach the top. They may be there for a while

Jrue Holiday

Success has a thousand fathers, but the Boston Celtics knew they needed an older brother.

They had everything else. Their foundational scorers, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, were 26 and 27. They figured Al Horford and Kristaps Porzingis would be enough inside. They had assembled an offensive machine that could shoot threes and capture the lane. And they had the hunger, built by their 2022 Finals loss, their 2023 Eastern Conference Finals loss to Miami after they wiped out an 0-3 deficit, their stumbles in three other Eastern Finals since their build-back-better job began.

But there was a hole they couldn’t quite identify, an ingredient that was hiding in the shelves. On the day before training camp began, general manager Brad Stevens finally put it in the cart. It wasn’t a set of skills or a collection of decimal points, although they certainly existed. It was Jrue Holiday, and all he entailed. He knew how to complete a recipe.

When the Milwaukee Bucks realized they were stuck at 211 degrees, they got Holiday from New Orleans, and in 2021 they won a championship. Then someone in their organization, maybe someone with a Greek background, decided what they really needed was Damian Lillard, the Hall of Fame-bound shooter who was perilously close to his expiration date.

A four-team shuffle followed, and Holiday went to Portland, where his winning ways and his relational abilities would have been marooned in the draft lottery. The Celtics then shipped sixth man Malcolm Brogdon, oft–injured center Robert Williams and a first-round pick and got Holiday. On Monday night they also got an NBA title, their first in 16 years and the 18th in franchise history, with a 106-88 Game 5 spanking of the Dallas Mavericks, and Holiday had 15 points and 11 rebounds. Thanks to him, the Celtics had one defender too many for the Mavericks, who shot 45.8 percent overall, 31.6 percent from the 3-point line, and saw Holiday and the other Celtics muffle Kyrie Irving (41.1 percent shooting, 19.8 points per game).

Holiday thus finished his 15th NBA season. There will be more, since he signed a four-year, $135 million extension. Monday’s title, achieved without the need for a Game 6 or a 7 and with only three losses, was always a goal but never a destination. This isn’t Toronto. Banners need company. With Holiday around and with Tatum, Brown and Derrick White in a career sweet spot, the Celtics will be favored to do this again.

Three times in the Eastern Finals sweep of Indiana, Holiday had the big steals and rebounds at the end. He was the California high school player of the year at Campbell Hall High in Los Angeles, where brothers Justin and Aaron started their own journeys to the NBA. He can shoot the threes when they're presented, and he did average 21.2 points for New Orleans one season, but he’s known as a forceful, strong, shape-shifting player, attuned to what’s required at any moment. He is the first player in NBA history to twice win a championship in his first year with a club.

Reared in a faith-based household by two former players, Holiday has brought the big-brother persona to every team. The NBA has a Teammate of the Year award, named for Jack Twyman and Maurice Stokes. Twyman was an All-Star for the Cincinnati Royals, Stokes a next-dimension big man who broke the NBA rebounding record in his second season. In 1958 Stokes fell to the floor, banged his head, and was paralyzed the rest of his life, and Twyman became his window to the world. Holiday has won the award three times. Donte DiVencenzo broke in with Milwaukee when Holiday was there, and is now with the Knicks, but still asks Holiday for wisdom today. Players don’t have to be in the rotation to fall under Holiday’s purview.

Actually, it’s Holidays’. At UCLA, Holiday met Lauren Cheney, who would help the U.S. win World Cup and Olympic gold in soccer. As the story goes, they met when Holiday was pretending to be miffed that someone thought he resembled UCLA teammate Darren Collison, and Cheney piped up with her opinion that Holiday was “much cuter.” It is assumed within the household that Lauren is, or was, Jrue’s athletic equal at the very least. As a couple they host dinners for Jrue’s teammates and smooth the waters for new arrivals.

But sometimes the counselors must heal themselves. In 2017 Lauren was pregnant when she discovered she had a benign brain tumor. She had surgery a month after her daughter, Jrue Tyler, was born. Holiday took a leave of absence from the Pelicans and missed 12 regular season games. All came through the ordeal.

On the basketball timeline, the Celtics have been the model for all franchises who want to pull the plastic off the magic slate and go back to zero. And, even then, this was their first title since Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Ray Allen and Rajon Rondo obliterated the Lakers in Game 6 of the 2008 Finals.

The project began in the 2014 season, when Stevens came from Butler to coach. Doc Rivers made it clear he wasn’t interested in such a heavy lift and became the Clippers’ coach. The Celtics cleared the decks and won 25 games. They have been a playoff team every year since.

They’ve had help. In 2017 they were picking third in the draft and watched Philadelphia, which was in the midst of a much more ballyhooed “process,” lead off with Markelle Fultz. The Lakers, with Magic Johnson at the helm, took Lonzo Ball, who was superficially reminiscent of Magic and thus the obvious choice. That left general manager Danny Ainge to take Tatum, who might be the best American player in the game today.

The year before, the draft order was the same: Philadelphia, the Lakers, and Boston. At the time Ben Simmons was billed as another Next Magic, a game-changer who could do everything but shoot. The 76ers took him, the Lakers went for Brandon Ingram at No. 2, and the Celtics were left with Brown. Eight years later Simmons still can’t shoot, although it would be hard for anyone to score from the training room. Now with Brooklyn, Simmons has played 332 NBA games. Brown has played 632. In fact, Tatum and Brown are the leading career scorers in both of their drafts, and Brown was voted the Finals MVP Monday, as one of several deserving Celtics.

And how does one get the third pick in two consecutive drafts? Ainge was trying to unload Garnett and Pierce after the 2013 season. He found an inexperienced, ambitious owner in the Nets’ Mikhail Prokhorov, who let an even less experienced surrogate, Dmitry Razumov, handle the details. Ainge kept asking for first-round picks and got them in 2014, 2016 and 2018, and arranged to swap draft picks in 2017. That put him in position to snatch Tatum and Brown if the 76ers and Lakers dropped the cake, which they both did twice. This did not stop Bill Simmons, Celtic superfan and failed ESPN studio commenter, from tweeting that the trade was so bad that “Doc Rivers just quit on the Celtics again,” not that Rivers ever did.

Stevens became the general manager when Ainge left to run the Utah Jazz. Ime Udoka, a well-respected assistant, became the coach and had one successful year before an inter-office affair got him fired (he now coaches Houston). Assistant coach Joe Mazzulla, who had only been a head coach at Division II Fairmont State, took over, and here’s where the Lakers intervene again. Jerry West always took interest in players from his alma mater, and when Mazzulla was arrested after a barfight at West Virginia, West gave him a call. Mazzulla was allowed to say “hello” and almost nothing else, but West’s harangue helped reposition Mazzulla. In his second season, Mazzulla, 35, became the youngest championship coach in league history.

Success has a thousand fathers, some of them unintentional. With Jrue Holiday high in the Celtics’ patriarchy, the foreseeable NBA will have to listen to just one daddy.