Boston Celtics News: This Element of His Trade from Bucks Bothered Jrue Holiday

Last summer, the Milwaukee Bucks may have inadvertently made room for their rivals to form a super team when they offloaded incumbent All-Star and All-Defensive Team combo guard Jrue Holiday to the Portland Trail Blazers as part of their deal to acquire All-Star point guard Damian Lillard. Holiday was promptly acquired by the Boston Celtics, who also had added big man Kristaps Porzingis via the Washington Wizards earlier in the offseason.

Now, Boston has emerged as far and away the heavy favorite to make the NBA Finals this season out of the Eastern Conference. The No. 1-seeded Celtics (57-15) tower over the No. 2-seeded Bucks (46-25) in their conference standings, leading by 10.5 games.

Holiday has been a key part of that. Though he wasn't named an All-Star this season after taking a step back as a scorer for a starry Celtics club led on that front by Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, Holiday and Derrick White have become one of the more harrowing backcourt tandems across the league, and could both wind up on the 2024 All-Defensive Team. Holiday is averaging just 12.8 points on .485/.445/.833 shooting splits, 5.4 rebounds, 4.9 assists, 0.9 steals and 0.8 blocks a night.

During a recent appearance on "The Draymond Green Show," Holiday told host and Golden State Warriors power forward Draymond Green, who beat a pre-Holiday Celtics in the 2022 Finals, about how he found out he was being traded. Holiday had helped Milwaukee win a title in 2021.

"Through the week in the offseason, you go in [to your team's training facility]. I'm already in Milwaukee because my kids go to school there and they started school," Holiday said. "Wednesday was my day off, and I'm taking a nap. [I've] got my Apple Watch on. I see a call from [the Bucks'] GM, I'm like, 'I'll call him back.' I'm deep in this nap too. It's a good one."

"And then two seconds later my agent called me, I'm like, 'All right.' So I pick up his call. He's like, 'You talk to him?' I'm like, 'Nah, bro, I'm sleeping.' He's like, 'Well, you just got traded so you should probably call him back. And then I end up looking at my phone, he ended up texting me everything that was happening... He ended up saying, 'Yeah, we traded you for Damian Lillard.' So I also had no clue. Just like the world had no clue, I also had no clue. He did tell me, I think before it broke on Twitter and all that."

"But I think for me it was just a shock because I had no clue... Maybe I felt like, not that I was untouchable, but maybe I had done enough to at least let me know 24 hours in advance, not five minutes in advance. Maybe I'm asking for too much, I don't know. I mean, I won there."

"I'm not upset with it, it was just more of a shock," Holiday continued. "If I was going to get traded, I thought I would at least know in advance... We had a life there, and then like I said, my kids were already in school. And then that next Monday was training day."