New Orleans Pelicans: Jrue Holiday is bucking his reputation

The New Orleans Pelicans have a great player on their hands in Jrue Holiday, but he’s not exactly the player they expected to receive. Here’s a look at how he’s changed.

A special thanks to FanSided Senior Editor and Columnist Ian Levy, whose help was immeasurable in the stats and information found and generated for this piece.

Polarity is a phenomenon we are taught in our first elementary lessons on the science of planet Earth. We learn that the Earth has two poles, and that these two opposite poles control the direction of the magnetic and electric fields on our planet. That’s about all our young, simple brains need to know, so we move on after that. Yet by watching the New Orleans Pelicans these past few years – more specifically, observing the path of Jrue Holiday’s career – we’ve all been done taken to school.

By existing out of the basketball limelight in New Orleans, Holiday has made league-wide consensus the punch line of a years-long joke. That joke is that he is a two-way player who leans on great individual defense and game management to provide value to his team. The truth is that his style and value come in the complete opposite manner.

Since the 2011-12 season (his second to last in Philly), Defensive Box Plus/Minus has rated him worse than average year. Box Plus/Minus is a box score-based estimate of a player’s net impact per 100 possessions. This past season, he fell all the way to Randy Foye/DeMar DeRozan territory. ESPN’s Defensive Real Plus/Minus graded him as .94 points worse per 100 possessions than an average points-preventer on defense.

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On 89 total possessions defending isolation attempts, he allowed .88 points per possession (PPP). To put that in context, that number placed him in the 43rd percentile compared to the rest of the league. He allowed .85 PPP when defending pick-and-rolls, which placed him in the 35th percentile of the NBA’s defenders.

None of this is terribly troubling at first glance, and a lot of it can be chalked up to poor team defense around him. Most of his individual stats (Defensive Win Shares, steal and block rates) have held static over time, and that’s encouraging. Yet he also allowed opponents to shoot around 70% from six feet and in as the primary defender. Where does the answer lie?

Unfortunately, he has developed a lot of the habits we have come to associate with a poor defensive player. For all of the ways he manages to use his strength and bulk on offense, he fails to do so on the other end. Getting caught on simple high screens is inexcusable at the point of attack, especially knowing that weaker defenders lay waiting on the back line:

A lot of Holiday’s problems arise when he fails to appropriately position or use his body. This gets exposed to an alarming degree on switches:

We’ll leave defense behind with this: Perhaps the league leaned into its frenzied, all-in-one style at precisely the wrong time. As Jrue’s injury woes worsened following his trade to the New Orleans Pelicans, a new brand of versatile, small lineups were mutated in labs from Golden State to Milwaukee, and he returned to a league he was less capable of defending in. As much as the front office has crafted a roster capable of covering for Anthony Davis’ weaknesses, the team has found players that compliment this new version of Jrue Holiday.

As seen in the chart above, as Holiday has crawled away from his reputation as a havoc-wrecker on defense, he has moved in the positive direction on offense. Whereas the unfavorable comparisons for his defense lie within one-way ball stoppers like DeRozan or aging shooters like Foye, he ranks near the likes of Kyrie Irving and JJ Redick in terms of Offensive Box Plus/Minus.

He posted potential assist (subtracting unmade attempts out of the equation) numbers close to those of Kyle Lowry, Reggie Jackson and Goran Dragic. Holiday again counted stars like Kyrie Irving (and John Wall) as his comrades in terms of his prolific success driving to the hoop. As a ball-handler running the pick-and-roll, he finished the season with a .88 PPP average, and managed to stay well above a 40% mark shooting the ball out of those plays.

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Perhaps as a result of playing off-ball less this year as his minutes increased and the health of fellow guards Eric Gordon, Norris Cole, and Tyreke Evans deteriorated, Holiday too often traded in good shots for bad ones, and his efficiency suffered as a result. Overall, his three-point percentage dipped back near league average, as his catch-and-shoot looks lessened and his pull-up attempts grew. Jrue made only 32.5% of his 2.9 pull-up attempts per game. That number is far outside of the game plan within Alvin Gentry’s system, but it’s a number that should go down as more capable playmakers surround Holiday on offense.

That system is what this all must tie back into; the question will always be whether or not Holiday can be the focal point of an efficient version of what Gentry wants to run on offense. He’s not Steve Nash, and he’s not Chris Paul, but he’s not a hobo’s version of those guys either. Jrue is good at a lot, and he gets the butter churning; the smoothness folds into the offense as guys are empowered by his play to succeed at what they’ve made a career doing. He gets other Pelicans involved on offense, runs an efficient drive-and-kick operation, and can score on his own as things break down:

But don’t get confused; Jrue is not a ball of destruction on defense, nor merely a crafty playmaker on offense. He has slowly risen past his meager offensive production on an overachieving Sixers team early on in his career, and has in turn sacrificed production on the other end.

Next: How the Pelicans can improve All-Star Weekend

Whether by way of injury, the rotating nature of his supporting cast, or the true unlocking of something great next to Anthony Davis, Holiday has become a good player, just one very different and less balanced than we expected.

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