If your definition of clutch does not include plays made outside the last minute of regulation or overtime, than Aaron Holiday was pretty much not clutch at all. But if you expand your definition to be the last two minutes, then all of a sudden he becomes clutchmaster supremo, the king of clutch mountain, the guy Kobe Bryant wishes he could be but never was.
Raptors fans are probably butthurt that such a marginal role-player like Holiday came in and kicked their butts all the way back to Toronto, but that’s nothing new. They get salty over everything. You could look at them in the wrong way and they’d immediately start moaning about “USA bias” and “the refs hate us” and “we are so cosmopolitan and cool and way better than those inbred hicks in the Midwest”. Even winning a championship can’t break those ingrained compensation mechanisms, I don’t blame them. And, honestly, sometimes the stereotypes are true; personally, I’m so inbred that I have several inherited genetic disorders. Just call me DownToHapsburg.
This game featured some tension, apparently, in the form of hecklers really going after Kyle Lowry, but watching this vid, you wouldn’t know it. It’s just Holiday going out there, cool as a cucumber, and hitting a whole bunch of clutch triples and making some clutch passes when he didn’t feel like dominating the Raptors directly. I don’t know if it’s “the game of his career” as the commentator claimed it was, but it’s definitely the second best game of his career, all things considered.