No, Jrue Holiday is not retiring, but he does want to end his career with the Milwaukee Bucks
LOS ANGELES – “Oh, the retirement thing?”
Jrue Holiday isn’t exactly the most active poster on his social media accounts, but he’s got his ears and eyes on the NBA discourse. He knows what he said in late May 2022 to good friends and former teammates-turned-podcasters Andrew Iguodala and Evan Turner about contemplating retirement at the end of his current contract with the Milwaukee Bucks.
There wasn’t much traction on the comment through the summer of 2022, and then Holiday turned in an all-star season in 2022-23 – his first selection in a decade. He made the all-defensive first team for the third time. He scored the second-most points of his career (19.3 per game) and had the fourth-most assists (7.4), most rebounds (5.1), best free throw percentage (85.9%) and a top-five career shooting season.
But as Milwaukee’s season unexpectedly came to an end in the first round of the playoffs, those comments surfaced in the broader NBA conversation. And more specifically with the Bucks’ timeline of re-signing Khris Middleton and Brook Lopez to align with the two team-controlled years left on Giannis Antetokounmpo’s deal.
Some felt Holiday’s retirement following a 2024-25 player option as a certainty, giving the Bucks a firm two-year window with their “Big Three” and/or “Core Four” with Lopez anchoring the middle.
So, yeah, about the retirement thing…
“No, I don’t plan on retiring. I don’t plan on retiring,” Holiday told the Journal Sentinel, leaning back on an orange leather couch set back off the balcony of SRGN Studios in Los Angeles.
“Just them being my friends and we’ve talked about stages in basketball and sometimes you go through modes or hard spots where like, even with my family, maybe the best thing to do is retire or even just being tired and being exhausted, playing a lot of basketball. But no.
“My answer is no, I’m not retiring.”
Jrue Holiday wants to spend career with Bucks
Holiday, who celebrated his 33rd birthday June 12, went beyond just saying he’s not going to hang up his sneakers after the 2024-25 season. He’s extension-eligible with the Bucks in the winter, and he is open to signing one.
“Would love to,” he said. “Before I even won here I think I said I’m a Buck for life and I mean that like deep in my heart. I don’t want to play for any other team. I think we have a chance to continue to do great things as the Bucks team and organization so I want to be in Milwaukee.”
The point guard is entering his 15th season, and fourth with the Bucks. When the organization acquired him in a trade with New Orleans before the start of the 2020-21 season, the front office felt Holiday was not only the right fit with Antetokounmpo and Middleton, but that he could turn in all-star level play into his mid-30s.
While Holiday insists he could give or take actually making the mid-season exhibition, he does believe he can continue to play at that level on both sides of the ball.
“That’s the challenge – the challenge is to see what’s next,” he said. “That does start with the grind in the summertime. It is pushing yourself to the max conditioning wise, pushing your body, using other guys as motivation, if it’s Giannis or if it’s somebody like Steph Curry or guys that I know that I’m going to go up against that I know are getting better and trying to defeat me and I want to do the same to them.”
Part of that is intangible, a confidence he got after helping the Bucks win a championship in 2021.
“The way that I correlate it is with winning,” he said. “So, being with the Bucks, having three of the best seasons I’ve had in my career, and not only that but having a winning record, being a top team or a top-three team, I don’t think I was ever on a top three-team until I came to the Bucks,” he said. “Growing up in the '90s and always hearing yeah, you’re one of the greatest if you win, so I’m thinking like, yeah, I’m that dude – or one of them – because of how I won, because we have won, and also because we’re on a winning team. I think that was part of it.
“I knew I was good, a good basketball player, but I didn’t really give myself that credit until I was on a team that won.”
As for the tangible side of preparing for the season, weightlifting and lateral, agility and reaction drills are always part of the plan. But there were some changes this summer. His newest addition was a cold plunge. He said he researched its mental and physical benefits, while also acknowledging he needed to prepare his body differently as he ages. A multi-sport athlete at heart, Holiday also worked in yoga, pilates and boxing.
“It’s always fun to learn something new and kind of take that with me and kind of get outside of basketball because I know basketball is going to be my life for eight months,” he said.
After playoff loss to Heat, Holiday looked in mirror
Tasked with carrying a heavier offensive load last season with Middleton missing 49 games and being slowed by injury in others, Holiday’s true shooting percentage and effective field goal percentage – efficiency statistics that are considered to reflect impact more accurately – did dip below his marks from his first two seasons in Milwaukee, yet they were still the third-best seasons of his career.
But there were few quibbles with Holiday’s regular season.
Following the Bucks’ stunning playoff exit, Holiday’s performance was put under the microscope. Miami Heat star Jimmy Butler averaged an astounding 37.6 points in 37.2 minutes per game, shooting 59.7% from the field and 44.4% from behind the three-point line.
Often, those buckets were made over Holiday as Wesley Matthews missed three games with a calf injury, Antetokounmpo missed nearly three full games after a fall and Middleton was hobbled with a late-season knee injury.
Those injuries mandated more offense, too, from Holiday and he averaged 17.8 points on just 40% shooting, while making only 28.6% of his three-pointers and 69.2% of his free throws.
The loss to Miami amplified an offensive trend for Holiday as a member of the Bucks, as his playoff offensive numbers across the board have declined sharply from his regular-season performances.
And in the last two playoff series (Boston and Miami) in which Middleton was missing or injured and Antetokounmpo was compromised, Holiday’s shooting dipped to 37% overall and his three-point shooting fell to 29%. While his offensive output in the championship run also fell short of his regular-season statistics that year, the stellar play of Antetokounmpo and Middleton offset that.
Not that he didn’t already know this, but as one of the more unflappable players in the league, being asked about this doesn’t elicit a reaction. His eyes remain fixed until the question about the playoffs is finished, and he replies coolly.
“You do look at it because I think initially when you don’t win or when you lose or when you’re disappointed, for me, I look at myself first,” he said. “And I see what could I have done better. Or why didn’t I do this or why didn’t I do that? So initially I do look at myself.”
The stoic Batman illustration on his T-shirt felt like an appropriate complement to his words.
“Then, you kind of look at the team – or I kind of look at the team – and be like, well, as a whole this is what maybe I felt we could’ve done better or what I could’ve done to help the team be better,” he continued. “So there is an aspect of looking at yourself in the mirror and go from there.”
Holiday was ‘hard on himself’ after loss to the Heat
Besides the obvious of having a healthy roster in the playoffs, what can a new coach do for Holiday when the playoff responsibilities on defense and offense only intensify with each passing game and series?
“I think he might be a little hard on himself,” coach Adrian Griffin told the Journal Sentinel, with a bit of a laugh. “We’ve had some intense battles and Jrue was always extremely difficult to stop.
“I would just say this. One of our team mantras this year is ‘we’re stronger together.’ We have a lot of individual talent and I want everyone to just know that this is a brotherhood, and no one is an island on their own. And they don’t have to do it alone. Jrue is more than enough. Giannis more than enough. Khris is more than enough. Brook. Everyone. If they just bring what they bring to the table, we’re going to be in good shape. But we have to do it collectively.
“As a player, your intentions are good. A lot of times players feel like, ‘I have to do more, I have to do more, I have to do more.’ Because of human nature. But all they have to do is bring what they’ve always brought to the table. And if everyone does that, especially with our roster, we have a really good chance.”
More: Key takeaways from Adrian Griffin's introduction: His style, meeting expectations and Giannis
As for Holiday, he is looking forward to that.
He acknowledged the buckets are harder to earn in the playoffs. There is the human element that sometimes works against you. But to Griffin’s point of looking at the next chance as a collective one, Holiday is on board with that – because in his mind there is no way to truly, individually, prepare for the playoffs.
“I know Giannis talks about it all the time – being consistent,” Holiday said. “And we were consistent throughout the regular season. So I think having that consistency, that camaraderie, that rhythm going into playoffs is awesome. I do feel like maybe our rhythm was a little off that first series for whatever reason it may be, but I do think having the actual feeling of being consistent, our team is in a rhythm and in a flow does prepare you for the postseason.
"But the intensity and the will to win and all that, it comes with being a competitor and being competitive and I don’t think you can train that. It just happens.”
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Jrue Holiday wants to stay with Milwaukee Bucks until end of career
