The Fantasy Basketball Encyclopedia

Player Dossier · Portland Trail Blazers

Jrue Holiday

Jrue Holiday remains Portland's defensive and organizational safety valve, but a move to a low-20s utility role makes him a late-round pick unless the guard room thins further.

2026-27 projection

GP MPG FG% FT% 3PM PTS REB AST STL BLK TO
62 23.0 .455 .830 1.9 12.0 3.8 4.8 1.1 0.3 2.0

Correction 2026-07-18: raised from 20.0 to 23.0 MPG and the counting stats re-derived, as part of redistributing the roughly 4,000 season minutes the team page had left assigned to nobody. Holiday absorbs a smaller share than Sharpe or Henderson because his own 62-game forecast and age-36 workload are themselves constraints, but a guard room that lost Caleb Love's 20.7 MPG and carries injury forecasts on both starters cannot leave its most positionally flexible veteran at 20 minutes.

Role and evidence

Holiday averaged 16.3 points, 4.6 rebounds, 6.1 assists, 2.6 threes and 1.0 steal in 29.4 minutes over 53 games in 2025-26. ESPN, accessed 2026-07-18. He also missed 27 games with a right-calf injury before returning in January. NBA/AP, 2026-02-07

The acquisition of Ja Morant and return of Damian Lillard displace Holiday from the base starting five. He still earns minutes at three positions because he is the only veteran guard who can credibly defend high-level perimeter creators. A closing role is more plausible than a 30-minute regular-season role.

Fantasy value

Range

Related: Portland Trail Blazers · Damian Lillard · Scoot Henderson

Career record

Pre-NBA: UCLA, one season (2008-09). 35 games, 8.5 points, 3.8 rebounds, 3.7 assists, 1.6 steals on .450/.307/.726, Pac-10 All-Freshman Team. He arrived as the most decorated recruit in the country — Gatorade National Player of the Year, Parade first-team All-American and a McDonald's All-American in 2008 — and had a modest statistical freshman year on a veteran Ben Howland team before declaring. Draft: 2009, first round, 17th overall by Philadelphia; no draft-night trade.

Season Age Team GP MPG PTS REB AST STL BLK 3PM FG% FT% TO
2009-10 19 PHI 73 24.2 8.0 2.6 3.8 1.1 0.2 0.8 .442 .756 2.1
2010-11 20 PHI 82 35.4 14.0 4.0 6.5 1.5 0.4 1.0 .446 .823 2.7
2011-12 21 PHI 65 33.8 13.5 3.3 4.5 1.6 0.3 1.0 .432 .783 2.1
2012-13 22 PHI 78 37.5 17.7 4.2 8.0 1.6 0.4 1.2 .431 .752 3.7
2013-14 23 NOP 34 33.6 14.3 4.2 7.9 1.6 0.4 0.9 .447 .810 3.1
2014-15 24 NOP 40 32.6 14.8 3.4 6.9 1.6 0.6 1.3 .446 .855 2.3
2015-16 25 NOP 65 28.2 16.8 3.0 6.0 1.4 0.3 1.3 .438 .843 2.6
2016-17 26 NOP 67 32.7 15.4 3.9 7.3 1.5 0.7 1.5 .454 .708 2.9
2017-18 27 NOP 81 36.1 19.0 4.5 6.0 1.5 0.8 1.5 .494 .786 2.6
2018-19 28 NOP 67 35.9 21.2 5.0 7.7 1.6 0.8 1.8 .472 .768 3.1
2019-20 29 NOP 61 34.7 19.1 4.8 6.7 1.6 0.8 2.0 .455 .709 3.0
2020-21 30 MIL 59 32.3 17.7 4.5 6.1 1.6 0.6 1.9 .503 .787 2.2
2021-22 31 MIL 67 32.9 18.3 4.5 6.8 1.6 0.4 2.0 .501 .761 2.7
2022-23 32 MIL 67 32.6 19.3 5.1 7.4 1.2 0.4 2.4 .479 .859 2.9
2023-24 33 BOS 69 32.8 12.5 5.4 4.8 0.9 0.8 2.0 .480 .833 1.8
2024-25 34 BOS 62 30.6 11.1 4.3 3.9 1.1 0.4 1.7 .443 .909 1.2
2025-26 35 POR 53 29.4 16.3 4.6 6.1 1.0 0.1 2.6 .451 .838 2.8
Career 1090 32.8 15.9 4.2 6.2 1.4 0.5 1.6 .461 .790 2.6

Seventeen seasons across five franchises, all changes made in the offseason or in-season trades that did not split a season's stat line: Philadelphia to New Orleans on July 12, 2013 for Nerlens Noel and a first; New Orleans to Milwaukee on November 24, 2020; Milwaukee to Portland on September 27, 2023 in the Lillard three-team deal, then Portland to Boston on October 1, 2023 without playing a game; Boston back to Portland on July 7, 2025 for Anfernee Simons. Two championships (2021 Milwaukee, 2024 Boston), two All-Star selections (2013, 2023), six All-Defensive teams (First in 2018, 2021, 2023; Second in 2019, 2022, 2024), and Olympic gold in 2020 and 2024.

Fantasy history: Season-end nine-category ranks are not verifiable from public sources for Holiday's seasons, so none are asserted here. The shape is well defined by the raw line and changed twice. Through 2022-23 he was a balanced top-of-the-middle-rounds nine-cat asset: 15-21 points, 6-8 assists, 1.2-1.6 steals, a positive field-goal percentage from 2017 on, and 1.5-2.4 threes, with 2.6-3.1 turnovers as the only real drag. The Boston years broke that — points fell to 12.5 and 11.1, assists to 4.8 and 3.9, steals under 1.1 — and he became a specialist whose case rested on percentages (.480 FG in 2023-24, .909 FT in 2024-25) and unusually low turnovers. Portland restored the volume in 2025-26 without restoring the defensive counting stats. Points leagues have consistently rated him below his category value, because assists, steals and free-throw percentage are worth more in nine-cat than in per-game points scoring; the exception was 2023-24 and 2024-25, when the low turnovers had no points-league cost and the low scoring had a large one.

Durability: 73, 82, 65, 78, 34, 40, 65, 67, 81, 67, 61, 59, 67, 67, 69, 62, 53. He has cleared 70 games four times in seventeen seasons and not since 2017-18. The worst stretch was 2013-14 and 2014-15: a stress fracture in the right tibia that required surgery in February 2014 and ended that season at 34 games, then a recurrence of the same lower-right-leg problem that held him to 40 games and a minutes restriction the following year. He also fractured his right interior orbital wall (diagnosed March 29, 2016), took an indefinite leave of absence beginning September 2016 to care for his wife and returned November 18, 2016, and had season-ending core muscle surgery on March 26, 2019. In 2025-26 he strained his right calf and last played on November 14; Portland initially set a one-to-two-week re-evaluation, cleared him for on-court progression on January 1, 2026, and he returned in mid-January after roughly 27 consecutive missed games — 53 played in total. A calf strain at 35 that ran six-plus times its original timeline is the most important single fact in this section.

Trajectory: The arc has three phases. Through 2016-17 he was a high-assist, mid-efficiency lead guard whose value was capped by turnovers and injury; from 2017-18 through 2022-23 he was the complete version — .479 to .503 shooting, 17-21 points, 6-7 assists, six All-Defensive selections — and the efficiency gain there was real, not volume-driven, because it held across two franchises and three usage levels. Boston was the third phase, a deliberate role reduction to fourth option, and it exposed how much of his category value had been usage rather than skill: per 36 minutes his assists fell from 8.2 in 2022-23 to 4.6 in 2024-25 while his minutes barely moved. Portland gave the usage back in 2025-26 — 16.3 points and 6.1 assists on the season, and 16.7 and 8.3 in the twelve games before the calf strain — which confirms the skill is intact but the opportunity is what determines the line. The age signal is elsewhere and it is unambiguous: steals down to 1.0 and blocks to 0.1, both career lows, in a player whose entire non-scoring value was defensive event creation. Entering his age-36 season behind Lillard and Morant, with a calf history and declining stocks, the honest expectation is the Boston version of the profile in fewer minutes, and the case for drafting him is an injury-contingency bet rather than a projection.

Career sources: ESPN career stats, StatMuse season-by-season, Wikipedia — Jrue Holiday, CBS Sports — 2025-26 calf strain updates

Open questions