Why the Bucks Gave Giannis His Own Holiday
One steal. One pass. One tip. With three hustle plays in three seconds, Jrue Holiday flipped the NBA Finals.
By Ben Cohen
Wall Street Journal
July 19, 2021 10:00 am ET
Jrue Holiday knocks the ball away from Devin Booker in Game 5 of the NBA Finals. PHOTO: ROSS D. FRANKLIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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In the weeks before this NBA season began, the Milwaukee Bucks made an odd decision.
They realized that convincing Giannis Antetokounmpo to sign the richest contract in league history and winning their first championship in a half-century both depended on someone who played for another team. They paid a fortune to trade for him. They paid another fortune to extend his contract. They were gambling the prime of a transcendent player and the future of the entire team on Jrue Holiday.
It took three plays in three seconds on Saturday for their bet on a borderline star to pay off.
One steal. One pass. One tip. The ball was barely in his hands, but Holiday’s fingerprints were all over their Game 5 win.
It was exactly what the Bucks had in mind when they brought him to Milwaukee, even if they couldn’t have dreamed that it would give them a 3-2 lead in the NBA Finals and a shot to win the title at home on Tuesday.
“I guess I was just in the right place at the right time,” Holiday said.
He was talking about ripping the ball away from Phoenix Suns star Devin Booker, but it also happens to be an excellent way to describe his role on what might be the NBA’s next champion.
The Bucks can’t win without Antetokounmpo. But they wouldn’t be in position to win a championship without someone like Holiday.
It’s hard to remember after one of the greatest weeks of Antetokounmpo’s career that his status was deeply uncertain when the Finals began. The sight of him crashing to the floor and the sound of him yelping with pain after hyperextending his knee in the last series were so ugly that even he thought he was done for the rest of the season. The Bucks then won two games against the Atlanta Hawks that bought Antetokounmpo more time to return.
He came back. He was brilliant. But it’s not enough for teams to have a superstar in today’s NBA. They also need players who fit perfectly around them.
The Bucks already had one in Middleton and found another complementary piece to Antetokounmpo in the perpetually undervalued Holiday, who can swing a game without being the best or even the second-best player on the floor. He’s too good and makes too much money to be called a glue guy, but he also plays as if he’s made of Elmers.
It’s why they wanted him and could soon be the NBA’s third straight champion that pulled the trigger on a blockbuster deal on their way to a title. The Toronto Raptors traded for Kawhi Leonard. The Los Angeles Lakers paired LeBron James with Anthony Davis. It seemed at various points in these playoffs that the decisive move of the season was the Brooklyn Nets snaring James Harden or the Phoenix Suns striking for Chris Paul.
But it was a trade for Jrue Holiday, whose one All-Star Game appearance came in 2013, that now has another team on the verge of a championship.
The reason the Bucks are in position to win a title in Game 6 on Tuesday is what happened at the end of Game 5 on Saturday. The Suns had mounted a furious rally and found themselves down one point with 30 seconds left when Booker drove to the basket and slammed into Antetokounmpo and PJ Tucker. With a basketball fortress in front of him, he tried spinning in retreat. Holiday was waiting on his blind side. By the time he realized he was swarmed, the ball had been snatched away. It wasn’t the most impressive defensive play of the series, but Holiday’s steal was easily the most important.
It turned out he was just getting started. Instead of dribbling out the clock, Holiday initiated a fast break. Instead of putting his head down and waiting to be fouled, he kept his eyes open and noticed the large Greek man running with him.
Holiday had the audacity to throw an alley-oop pass. Chris Paul played defense by attempting to shove the enormous human jumping over him. Antetokounmpo took the foul and dunked it anyway. “They don’t call him the Freak for nothing,” Holiday said.
For all that Antetokounmpo makes look so freakishly easy on a basketball court, there is one thing that he makes look way too hard: foul shots. Antetokounmpo’s free throw hit the front rim and clanged hard enough for a crashing Holiday to get another hand on the ball, deflecting it backward for Antetokounmpo to pass to Middleton to get fouled, make a free throw and ice the game.
There have been very few sequences that have ever swung a team’s championship probability so much and almost certainly none that involve a player scoring as many points in those three plays as Holiday: zero.
While he doesn’t have to score to be effective, the Bucks are basically unbeatable if he does. He scored 27 points and 13 assists on 12-of-20 shooting in Game 5. He scored 13 points on 4-of-20 shooting in Game 4. The Bucks won both. “He can affect the game in so many ways,” said Antetokounmpo, who knows something about that particular skill. “I love being teammates with him.”
It was not surprising to hear Antetokounmpo sound like he was in a heated campaign for president of the Jrue Holiday fan club, since the people who appreciate his subtle talents more than perhaps anybody else in the world are NBA players. They are the ones who notice him fighting over screens, sliding his feet and doing all the imperceptible things invisible to the untrained eye. There is no higher compliment than Kevin Durant and Damian Lillard agreeing they would rather see anybody else guarding them.
“To me,” Lillard said on JJ Redick’s podcast last year, “he’s the best defender in the league.”
Giannis Antetokounmpo dunks the ball over Chris Paul during Game 5 of the NBA Finals. PHOTO: CHRISTIAN PETERSEN/GETTY IMAGES
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Paul and Booker would probably say the same thing after being pestered by him. He is such a tormenting defender that Paul and Booker are scoring at nearly double the rate with anybody else on the Bucks guarding them in this series, according to NBA tracking data.
His ability on both sides of the ball is the reason the Bucks traded for him before this season, when they needed a dramatic change after two years of finishing with the NBA’s best record and two years of playoff flameouts. He wasn’t a cheap investment. Holiday cost two players, three first-round draft picks and two future pick swaps, as the Bucks signaled to Antetokounmpo how seriously they were taking his championship aspirations, and his contract extension in the middle of the season cost as much as $160 million.
It was a deal that secured Antetokounmpo, Middleton and Holiday as the core of what the Bucks hoped would be a championship roster. There have been many times in the playoffs when it appeared otherwise. They were down 2-0 to the Brooklyn Nets. They were also down 2-0 to the Suns in the Finals. They were even down one Antetokounmpo against the Hawks.
Now they are down to one win away from a title.
Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com
Why the Bucks Gave Giannis His Own Holiday - WSJ |
