Firstly, this isn’t meant to be negative towards Jrue, but is instead intended to highlight Giannis’s impact.

I saw a tweet questioning why Jrue’s true shooting was only at 52% this season because he’s usually fairly efficient in the regular season and that got me curious so I did some digging.

Jrue had a true shooting of 59% in the regular season during his time in Milwaukee, which is about 3% better than league average, and every season here he had positive efficiency. He only has one other season with positive efficiency, that was in 2017-18 when he had a true shooting of 57% which was 1.4% better than league average that year. Every other year of his career he had below league average true shooting. I was very surprised to see that so I dug a little bit further.

My thought process was that this happened specifically because he played with Giannis who opened up the floor for him a ton, and that seems to be exactly what happened. Jrue’s 3 point percentage was 39% over his 3 years here, including a career high 41% in 2022. Jrue was only a career 35% 3 point shooter before coming to Milwaukee and his previous career high (39%) occurred twice and came very early in his career in Philadelphia and early in New Orleans where he was a much lower volume shooter taking about half as many attempts per game (2.2 in Philly and 2.3 in NOLA vs 5.3 here). It’s a small sample size but he’s back down to 35% on 3s in Boston despite taking fewer attempts (4.6). Jrue’s best 3 point shooting seasons all came in Milwaukee and that is very likely because Giannis’s scoring gravity inside creat more open looks for Jrue than he’s ever had.

It makes sense that that one of the most dominant paint forces ever would create open 3s but the more interesting part is that Giannis also seems to have helped Jrue’s efficiency by creating more open layups. Jrue’s 2 best seasons ('21 and '23) in fg% on shots from 0-3 feet came in Milwaukee and his overall fg% in that are over his 3 years here was 69%. His best season prior was in 2018 when he shot 67% and has been below 63% in 10 of his 12 seasons on other teams, including this year. I think a lot of that has to do with Giannis’s gravity off ball as opposing bigs were more consered about stopping Giannis from getting the ball than they were about protecting paint.

I know correlation doesn’t equal causation but I find it hard to believe that Jrue’s 3 most efficient seasons all came in Milwaukee and they were noticeably more efficient than his other seasons, so in conclusion, Giannis makes his teammates better simply by opening things up for them.

Edit: source: https://www.basketball-reference.com/players/h/holidjr01.html