Sixers' Jrue Holiday weary but not ready to rest

WITH THE Sixers now mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, truths can be told about this season. Here's one that probably isn't a shock: Jrue Holiday is dog tired - from the shoulders down and from the ears up.

After a spirited scrimmage session that lasted about a half-hour on Monday - the team's first get-together since a Saturday loss at Miami coupled with a Milwaukee win put the playoffs out of reach - Holiday was asked whether his recent play was a product of the heavy load he has been carrying all season.

Holiday has posted career highs in points per game (18.1), assists (8.5), rebounds (4.3) and three-pointers (84). But more telling is the 38.4 minutes a game he has logged, almost 5 more than last season. And there was no midseason break for the fourth-year guard, as he was selected to his first All-Star Game. So with six games to go before the offseason begins, Holiday let on that he was dragging a bit.

"It's been tiring, obviously. I won't lie," said Holiday, who has shot 12-for-55 (21.8 percent) over his past three games, including a 2-for-24 stinker at Charlotte. "It's my first time really going through a season where you're averaging more than 35 minutes. It's about taking care of yourself. There's a lot of things that I can't do that other people probably can. I'm sleeping all day instead of waking up and going out and watching a movie or something. I'm in bed all day."

And the mental fatigue?

"That's something that you also have to learn," Holiday said. "I was talking to the vets, like Damien [Wilkins] and Dorell [Wright] and all the guys that have been here and been on good and bad teams and really just going through that struggle. It's just something new and something I'm trying to get through."

Getting through the end of a meaningless string of games before the season mercifully ends isn't an enviable position, obviously, but Holiday knows that there are still positives to be gained from now until then. He knows it because his coach drills it into his tired mind just about every day.

"Anytime your responsibility goes up, there's a learning curve that goes with that," said coach Doug Collins, before his team took the train to Brooklyn for Tuesday's game against the Nets. "We knew in the offseason once we made the big trade and once we lost Dre [Andre Iguodala] and we lost Moe Harkless, two guys that we probably would have counted on the wing for some heavy minutes, that both Jrue and Evan's [Turner] workloads were going to go up.

"The mental aspect of it is huge. On nights where you are a little fatigued, you reach into that reservoir of the mental aspect of it and fight yourself through. What happens is, when you're in the game a little bit longer, you learn how to [pile up the minutes] without pacing yourself. The most important thing is you don't pace yourself so you don't have dead minutes on the floor. Sometimes your first time through with that, you may find yourself pacing a little bit. I'm not saying that Jrue is doing that. In fairness to Jrue, we've put a tremendous amount of responsibility on Jrue this year."

And now Holiday is looking to lead this young group to the finish line, not dragging its collective feet, but looking to play its best basketball of the season.

"We're just a bunch of young guys who still want to win, still have that urge to win games," Holiday said. "We didn't have the season that we wanted. Coming down the stretch it can be easy, especially in my first year when we just called it in. Every game was just free flowing, and if you started losing the game you just gave up. But this team, I don't think we've given up this year, especially in the second half of the season. We still need to win each and every game. We wanted to beat Miami, we want to beat them every time we play them. Every team that we play against, we want to beat them."