Philadelphia 76ers: Justin Holiday is the wrong mid-level trade target

Justin Holiday is a classic case of a Philadelphia 76ers original made good.

Initially entering the league as a UDFA out of Washington, the middle brother of Jrue and Aaron made his NBA debut in April of 2013, where he played nine games for Doug Collins’ Sixers. While Holiday didn’t stick around long, as he was waived by the team the following summer and didn’t get to experience the fever dreams and nightmares we now collectively know as “The Process,” his NBA career showed surprisingly long legs.

Following his release by the Sixers, Holiday went to play for the Szolnoki Olaj in Europe in 2014, before latching on with the Golden State Warriors as a deep bench. Though Holiday only appeared in 59 games and played an average of 11.1 minutes in each contest, he parlayed his success into a multi-year deal with the Atlanta Hawks before being traded to Chicago in the spring of 2016. From there, Holiday played all over the league, for the Knicks, the Bulls, the Grizzlies, and now the Indiana Pacers, where he has been a steady rotation player since 2019.

After bouncing in and out of the NBA for the better part of four years, it’s pretty cool to see Holiday not only stick around into his 30s but actually record a 250 game ironman streak that was ultimately dashed last December. And now that his Indiana Pacers have essentially accepted their fate and packed it in for the season, the pride of Mission Hills, California could soon find himself back on a playoff team once more, as general manager Kevin Pritchard would reportedly like to move the ninth year vet to another team for a pair of future second-rounders.

Should teams be interested in Justin Holiday’s services? Most definitely, but not the Philadelphia 76ers, as he doesn’t check very many of the team’s proverbial boxes.

The Philadelphia 76ers need one-year specialists, not all-around rotation guys.

First and foremost, allow me to introduce you to Justin Holiday. He’s a 32-year-old guard/forward who has averaged 9.7 points, 3.3 rebounds, and 1.5 assists in 27.9 minutes of action a night as a member of the Pacers and backs that up with a steal, a free throw, and half a block per game. While Holiday does take 71.25 percent of his shots from beyond the arc, he only makes them at a 38.6 percent clip, which is above average league-wide, but not exactly elite for a 3-and-D winger.

League-wide, every team could use a few players like Holiday; he plays good defense, can switch on screens, and can play alongside basically anyone regardless of lineup, roster, or rotation.

That’s the good news. The bad news, at least for Holiday’s prospects of returning to the City of Brotherly Love, is that the Philadelphia 76ers actually have quite a few players with similar sets of skills.

That’s right, from George Niang to Furkan Korkmaz, Danny Green, Isaiah Joe, and even Matisse Thybulle if you squint at his 3 point shooting percentage, the Sixers have quite a few 3-and-D wings on their roster, and to secure Holiday’s services, the team would likely have to trade one or more of those players to make the deal work financially. Is, say, Holiday better than Korkmaz? Maybe, maybe not, but he certainly isn’t better than Korkmaz, and the draft picks needed to make a deal work within the NBA’s matching salary rules.

And while we’re talking about salaries, Holiday’s contract, which has an AAV of $6 million, actually runs through the 2022-23 season. Normally, that’s a good thing, as teams generally like to acquire players with multiple years of service left on their contract for multiple, very obvious reasons; the Sixers are looking to free up future money, not load up on it, as they need the ability to absorb James Harden’s contract should the smoke around his interest of moving down I-95 actually catch fire (more on that here).

In past seasons, the last two to be exact, Holiday would have been a fun addition to the team, but now? Now, the Sixers need to trade for specialists either on expiring contracts, semi-guaranteed contracts, or on deals cheap enough to be absorbed onto the books without affecting the team’s future plans.

Alright, cool; what kind of specialist are we talking about? Do the Sixers need a traditional power forward who can alleviate their rebounding woes and play alongside Joel Embiid? Or what about a pass-first point guard, maybe even one tall enough to offset Seth Curry’s height? And shooters, what about shooters? The Sixers only have two players on their roster right now who are shooting above 40 percent from 3, and one of those players is Tyrese Maxey.

Yes, please.

I know it sounds vague, and in a way, it is, but the Sixers don’t have a lot of players who can do one thing really well. They have a few, Maxey with scoring, Curry with shooting, Drummond with rebounding, Thybulle with defense, and Embiid with quite literally everything, but the majority of the team’s players are “jack of all trades” types who complement the team’s featured performers. That’s all well and good, and occasionally one or more of those players can turn in a signature outing to win their team a game, but you’ll almost never see Doc Rivers draw up plays for, say, Charlie Brown Jr., let alone Green, Niang, Korkmaz. If the Sixers are going to trade for a player they like, one who can be re-signed via some sort of Bird Rights once their big trade is done one way or another, they should ID players who make their current ones better, a shooter for Embiid, a passer for Embiid, or a rebounder for Embiid, instead of another rotational guy who can eat up minutes at both ends of the court.

The Philadelphia 76ers find themselves in the weirdest spot of any NBA team in recent memory. They’re very good with the potential to become great and have a legit MVP candidate in his prime, and yet, for a ton of reasons you surely know, they are limiting their own short-term potential for a shot at long-term greatness. Could the team pull off some sort of fantastic move and find themselves the undisputed favorites to win the East at the deadline? Potentially so, but it’s more likely the team holds off on any big deals and instead tries to land a specialist who can improve their roster on the margins without sacrificing any future optionality. Justin Holiday, while a fun story from two regimes past, doesn’t do that in the way the team needs and thus probably isn’t the ideal trade target this go-around.