Pels reportedly shopping point guard Jrue Holiday – is Boston a fit?

The Pels want to move Jrue Holiday and Boston could use better point guard depth — is there a trade to be made here?

The Boston Celtics need to keep starting point guard Kemba Walker’s knees fresh for the postseason after what may be a historically short turnaround for an offseason given the exigencies of trying to hold an NBA season in a pandemic.

At the same time, The Athletic’s Shams Charania is reporting that the New Orleans Pelicans ” are openly discussing star Jrue Holiday in trade talks and several contending teams are pursuing.”

Could the Celtics be among his suitors?

Probably not, though it is certainly possible. In terms of need, the fit is a good one, with Holiday able to provide a lot of regular season minutes while also bringing a strong defensive look to the team that could be useful to deploy when Walker is off the court in the postseason.

There are a few reasons why the chances aren’t good, though.

Chief among them is salary — with the Pels floor general set to earn $26.2 million in 2020-21, only Walker, Gordon Hayward,  Jaylen Brown and Marcus Smart make enough money to make a deal work, and only one of the three makes sense to trade.

That player would be Hayward, and he’d need to opt into the final year of his current deal for that to happen unless he wanted a sign-and-trade to that team specifically.

It would make no sense at all to trade away Brown for a lesser player in the midst of a contending season, and Smart is a lateral move who makes much less.

Walker is the guy you’re trying to help with such a deal, so dealing him makes no sense either unless you see Holiday as a more worthwhile replacement.

Factoring in knee health for th UConn product, there’s a case there if you could secure an extension — Holiday has a player option of his own for the season after next — or if Boston approached such a trade as a bridge to a third player yet to emerge as a trade candidate.

All of this to say that while a trade to bring the Pels point guard to Boston isn’t an impossibility, but it’s also a pretty unlikely outcome.

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