In a league drifting further and further towards “positionless basketball”, Jrue Holiday is one of the more interesting cases in this regard. Holiday has played the majority of his career at point guard. He’s also played his best basketball at shooting guard. Placing a position on him is just about semantics and at the end of the day, irrelevant.
However for the sake of this exercise we’ll call him a point guard. He’s got the most experience there and the Pelicans’ roster moves this summer indicate he will be playing there.
He shot 32.5 percent from deep last year while assisting on 31.8 percent of all his teammate’s field goals while he was on the court. For that reason, it makes more sense to allow him to be the primary ball distributor. If you’re not sold yet, it’s highly unlikely New Orleans shelled out $26.5 million to have J.J. Redick sit on the bench.
Holiday is a two-time All-Defensive team member that will be the de facto leader of a team with stout defenders saturating the roster. He looks to improve on an impressive performance last season where he averaged the most points (21.2) and highest Box Plus/Minus (2.8) of his career.
With a fully reconstructed roster around him instead of Anthony Davis giving a lackluster effort each night, the Pelicans may have finally put Holiday in a position to succeed. Entering this season at 29-years-old, we’ll get to see just how big of an improvement one of the best two-way guards in the league can make.