It's quite uncontroversial in the year of Our Bron 2025 to say that Jrue Holiday is good at the playing of the game of basketball.
The thing is, Jrue is not so much a spot on the roster as much as he is an addiction. A team doesn't add Jrue Holiday as much as they are moulded by him, an epoxy remedy for even the most imperfect of teams. Sure, he may not be loud, or flashy, nor will he sell significant shoes for Nike and only nerds like me will name drop him in a pub debate.
And when he is gone–and the time will come when he is gone, because no player can outrun time and entropy–it will sting. It will be a withdrawal worse than having delirium tremens and croaking for speed at the same time, and the patient next door is playing Limp Bizkit at full volume through a Marshall speaker.
You might think this is hyperbole, but it's hardly such. Jrue Holiday is the NBA's ultimate glue guy, a player so versatile that a team goes from "yea this is pretty good" to "did the planets just align?". This is a player whose addition was enough to turn the imperfect but effective 2020-2021 Milwaukee Bucks into playoff champions. Everyone talks, righteously so, about Giannis' coronation, but without Jrue Holiday making an ass of Chris Paul in games three through six, it would've been a magnicide.
The latest junkies hooked on the Jrue Holiday drug are the Boston Celtics, and man their addiction to him is enough to reduce Kurt Cobain to a casual Advil user. He fit the roster like a glove and immediately elevated the two Jays to NBA champions, too, in a manner that seemed almost preordained. Everyone talks about Jaylen Brown's redemption, but the quiet brilliance of Jrue Holiday was still there, still smouldering with the flame of his glueness.
In a move that defines "well, if you really want me to, two fingers pointing at each other emoji", the Celtics locked him down with a $125 million extension, and it's a testament to how much a team can be elevated by going on a nice Holiday trip that it still looks like a bargain. He may not be the team's MVP, but he's the player who out of everyone in the roster keeps the championship window open for longer, and more importantly was key in raising that banner that allowed Boston to again believe in its own myth.
Unfortunately for everyone not from Boston, but hey.
And it will hurt like hell when he's gone from Boston, too. Jrue Holiday will be 38 when the deal expires, and he'll probably retire a Celtic, as the TD Garden faithful pretend they're not crying. Maybe they'll convince themselves there's life after Jrue, just like Milwaukee tried to deceive themselves it would be fine. It was not fine. It will never be.
He's the rare player who makes you believe everything will be okay just because he's there on the court, doing things mere box scores cannot reflect and some other things it can, too.
One day, he won't be there anymore. All that will remain is an air of loss, as if the game of basketball ceased to be as joyous as it once was.
Sure, go ahead. Get hooked on Jrue Holiday. Marvel at his defense, count the banners he helped you hang, hell, you may even enjoy your love-hate relationship with his shot selection. But this too shall pass, and when it passes, it will be painful. The cruel joke is that his game won't last forever, just long enough to make you wish it could.