NBA Executives React to the Celtics Landing Jrue Holiday
Shortly after the biggest trade of the 2023 NBA offseason that sent Damian Lillard to the Milwaukee Bucks, the Boston Celtics landed Jrue Holiday.
The Celtics needed a great defensive replacement since Marcus Smart and Grant Williams left and they got it. Jrue Holiday easily made this team the favorite to win the 2023-24 NBA Finals and there have been reports of executives around the league who are feeling a similar sentiment, according to ESPN NBA analyst Zach Lowe.
“I got texts from a couple of non-partisan front office executives … that were in the vein of, ‘This is what I worried about for the Bucks when they made the Lillard trade: that Boston would come in and get Jrue Holiday, and that the Bucks … may have inadvertently helped their biggest rival more than they realized they did — and maybe more than they helped themselves,'” Lowe said Monday on “The Lowe Post” podcast.
Lowe doesn’t fully believe that the Bucks aided the Celtics more than they did themselves, but he claims that executives from the East see Jrue Holiday as a game-changer for the Celtics.
“I heard from a couple of front office executives from good Eastern Conference teams, and the texts that I received in the immediate wake of the trade were two and three words long, to the tone of, ‘Well f— us,’ or ‘Oof, this sucks,'” Lowe said.
This trade looks great on paper and it will be exciting to see how Holiday’s lockdown defense will replace the play of Smart and Williams.
These reported reactions about this trade from around the league are very telling. The Celtics made a great move and put the league on notice. Other teams who lost out on these huge trades will likely feel it later on in the season and will be sorry that they didn’t pursue it harder.
