In order for the Celtics to repeat, Jrue Holiday will need to have his fingers all over it
This much is certain: The Celtics are going to need Holiday at his best come the postseason and that journey through June.
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The Celtics are deep into their new season and quest, so we’ll resist turning too many pages of the 2024 yearbook, as fun as it might be to revisit again and again.
Just allow me to note something from the delightful journey to Banner 18 last June. A favorite memory, really, but also illustrative of what needs to happen if a repeat is going to be [Kevin Garnett voice] possssiiibbbblllle.
I think if you polled Celtics fans and asked them to cite their favorite single play from the postseason, the majority — perhaps a vast majority — would immediately say Payton Pritchard’s buzzer-beating bomb, from just beyond half court and just before halftime, in Game 5 of the Finals.
I get the vote. Pritchard’s shot — from 48 feet, 9 inches, if you’ve got the tape measure out — was the confirmation that, yes, damn straight, the Celtics were going to win this thing. It brought on the loudest roar I’ve ever heard in the new Garden, a guttural kind of joy and catharsis that surely rattled the trains down below.
It’s not my vote, though. My vote for favorite single play of the championship run was Jrue Holiday’s game-saving, I’ll-be-taking-that-basketball-now steal from the Pacers’ Andrew Nembhard in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals.
It was the kind of clutch late-game defensive play — one requiring ridiculous lateral movement, strength, anticipation, and intelligence — that Holiday has made time and again throughout his career. (See: Devin Booker, Game 5, 2021 NBA Finals; or Marcus Smart, Game 5, 2022 Eastern Conference semifinals.)
With the Celtics leading by a point and Nembhard accelerating down the court in transition, Holiday cut him off, stumbled slightly, stood up the Pacers guard, poked the ball free with his left hand, and zipped downcourt while the Pacers were forced to foul.
The steal was not the most essential play of the Celtics’ postseason run, or even from their sweep in that series. (That designation probably goes to Jaylen Brown’s off-balance, tying 3-pointer at the end of Game 1 regulation in an eventual overtime victory.)
But it was quintessential Holiday, who came to the Celtics in a trade with the helpful Trail Blazers just before training camp last season and proved to be the final piece to their championship puzzle. He was like a calm Smart, and I know that’s like calling a hurricane relaxing, but it’s true. Holiday matched and even surpassed Smart’s relentless defensive sensibilities, while bringing poise — and some deadeye 3-point shooting — rather than chaos to the offense.
I remain convinced that one of the reasons Jayson Tatum and Brown became better and more willing passers is because they know that Holiday and Derrick White will get the ball back to them if it’s the proper play. I do not believe they felt that way about Smart.
All right, so we spent a little more time in last year’s yearbook than anticipated. I imagine you understand why, and how that connects to the Celtics’ pursuit of a repeat, and whether Bill Simmons and the producers of “Celtics City” will have to get started on an epilogue in June.
They are going to need more plays like that out of Holiday for this quest to be fulfilled. His current status makes me a little concerned about whether he’ll be in a position to do so.
Holiday has missed the last two games with something called “mallet finger,” which sounds both silly and painful. The tip of the pinkie on his shooting hand bent backward while he was going for a rebound, and it’s more serious than the general jam and swelling that happens when a basketball hits your finger the wrong way.
The injury can sideline a player for weeks. Coach Joe Mazzulla says it’s day to day and a matter of pain management, but I’ve been skeptical of Celtics injury timelines since Garnett’s half-dozen aborted imminent returns from a knee injury during the 2008-09 season. I’ll believe Holiday is fine the next time he picks a fellow guard’s pocket with his mallet-fingered hand, and only then.
Of course, this isn’t a suggestion that Holiday is the most important Celtic in that pursuit of a repeat. Tatum and Brown are essential, and as reliable on a day-to-day basis as superstars get. Kristaps Porzingis remains the ultimate wild card. The Celtics are at their best when White is at his. Holiday? He’s an important cog in a team that is downright exceptional when everyone is healthy and working in unison.
His fit here, his malleability to whatever the Celtics needed on the court last season, was admirable. This season, at age 34, he hasn’t quite been able to provide that all of the time. He’s shooting just 43.8 percent from the field (down from 48 percent last season) and a Smartian 34.2 percent from three, down from 42.9 in 2023-24. No, wise guy, he hasn’t had a mallet finger all season. Perhaps the blessing with this injury is that he gets even a little more in-season rest than the Celtics had planned to prescribe.
This much is certain: The Celtics are going to need Holiday at his best come the postseason and that journey through June. Anyone who saw Donovan Mitchell drop 41 points on the Celtics’ heads last Friday — including 26 in the second half — knows that the well-rounded Cavaliers are as legitimate as their 50-10 record suggests.
Not to get too far ahead, but the Celtics’ path to a second straight championship is certain to be more fraught than the one they traveled last year.
A Celtics-Cavaliers playoff series, presuming full health for both teams, would almost certainly go seven games, and perhaps even down to the final possession or two. Those are the situations when Holiday, ol’ Mallet Finger himself, habitually drops the hammer.
The Celtics need to do everything they can to get Holiday healthy and right, even if it means sacrificing a win or two now to buy him extra rest and healing time.
After all, if we know Jrue Holiday, we know there’s a decent chance he will reward their patience by stealing a win or two just when the stakes are highest.
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