{"id":193328,"date":"2025-10-06T15:31:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T15:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/193328\/"},"modified":"2025-10-06T15:31:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T15:31:07","slug":"painful-jrue-holiday-truth-the-blazers-will-quickly-realize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/193328\/","title":{"rendered":"Painful Jrue Holiday truth the Blazers will quickly realize"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once upon a time, Jrue Holiday was a true point guard. He was essentially the definition of “point guard,” providing a perfect balance of facilitation, scoring, and quarterback-ing of offenses in New Orleans and Milwaukee. But that’s not really the case anymore \u2014\u00a0in Boston, Holiday’s responsibilities were closer to a secondary guard option, and he hasn’t been asked to be the frontman of an offense in a few years.<\/p>\n

The guard-starved Portland Trail Blazers will rely on Holiday<\/a> to be that dictionary-definition point guard he once was. Now 35 years old, can he become that player again? The Blazers’ offense sort of hinges on it. If he can’t, fans will quickly realize the offensive ceiling of this team is league-average. That’s a bit of a painful reality.<\/p>\n

I don’t think Holiday is totally washed up \u2014 he finished sixth in Defensive Player of the Year voting just two seasons ago \u2014 and I foresee him playing a big part in the Blazers’ operations this year (partly out of necessity). But last year, Holiday averaged 3.9 assists per game, and the year prior he averaged 4.8 after averaging over six per game in each of his three seasons with the Bucks. Those decreased facilitation numbers were in part because the Celtics didn’t need Holiday to create offense with so many top-flight offensive talents around him.<\/p>\n

Of course, assist numbers aren’t the end-all, be-all determinant on how a player is deployed in an offense, but the numbers matched the eye test in Boston: Holiday was great to have, but wasn’t responsible for making that offense go.<\/p>\n

In Portland, he’s not awarded that luxury. He will need to quarterback the offense<\/a> in Portland, and whether he can transform back into the Jrue Holiday who played an integral role on the 2021 NBA Finals-winning Bucks team will be a pretty big swing factor in determining the upside of these Blazers.<\/p>\n

Blazers lack of scoring pop won’t do Jrue Holiday any favors<\/p>\n

That transformation won’t be a cake walk in Portland, where the Blazers lack offensive punch. Toumani Camara and Deni Avdija are both awesome, but neither is a 20-point per game scorer. The center rotation is talented but inexperienced and offensively limited right now. Matisse Thybulle is almost solely focused on the defensive side. Shaedon Sharpe, as we all know, holds the keys to this offense alongside Holiday.<\/p>\n

Thus, Jrue Holiday can’t be a cog in the machine like he was in Boston. Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Derrick White, and Kristaps Porzingis would probably all have a good case of being the best player on the Blazers. Obviously, Holiday’s situation has changed greatly. For him to get the most out of it, he needs to change (back) as well, to the true point guard role he once personified.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Once upon a time, Jrue Holiday was a true point guard. He was essentially the definition of “point…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":193329,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[49,48,459,82],"class_list":["post-193328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/193329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}