Haliburton: The Clutch Player Who Silences His Critics
The ball soared through the air after hitting the rim, while Tyrese Haliburton retreated towards the middle of the court. He knew exactly where it would fall.
He had gotten the shot he wanted, running towards the basket with a clear path, before turning and stepping back towards the three-point line to execute his characteristic step-back jumper. A move that has become his personal trademark.
Haliburton felt the ball seemed to hang in the air, rising and falling along with the hopes of the more than 19,000 fans present. When the ball finally went through the net, he knew exactly how he wanted to commemorate the occasion.
He turned to Reggie Miller, the Hall of Fame member and Pacers legend turned TNT commentator, who was on the sidelines. Both men now united by their ability to “troll” the New York fans. As he approached Miller, Haliburton brought his hands to his throat, mimicking the iconic gesture with which Miller had provoked Knicks fans 30 years earlier, holding the pose as his teammates surrounded him at midcourt.
Haliburton thought he had scored the winning shot, but the replay revealed that his foot was on the line, taking the game to overtime. After the game, he admitted that he would have waited to do the celebration if he had known the game wasn’t over. However, Haliburton had paved the way for Indiana to complete an improbable comeback, something the Pacers have made routine.
After Indiana sealed the victory in overtime, Haliburton shared a moment with Miller from across the court: a look of recognition from Miller, passing the torch from one “troll” to the next.
“Definitely a special moment,” Haliburton said after the game. “It’s great that he was in the pavilion for that.”
Tyrese Haliburton
The shot was Haliburton’s third game-winner in the postseason, and it wasn’t the first time he had faced the Knicks.
In Game 7 of the second round last season, Haliburton exchanged words with Knicks fans who were in the front row, taunting them as the Pacers’ lead grew, evoking the days when Miller was public enemy number one at the Garden.
Then, he entered smiling at the post-game press conference, wearing a sweatshirt with the image of Miller’s infamous gesture towards Spike Lee and the New York fans from 30 years ago.
“I love external motivation,” Haliburton told ESPN at the beginning of the playoffs. “If someone talks trash about me, I want to know because I want to respond. I want to go at them.”
Tyrese Haliburton
Indiana’s improbable victory on Wednesday gives them a 1-0 lead heading into Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals in New York on Friday night.
Haliburton is at the center of everything, with his basketball DNA infiltrating every aspect of his team: ball movement, constant “trash talk,” and the composure to excel in crucial moments.
“Absolute self-confidence,” said Pacers center Myles Turner. “In this environment, many players like him, with that DNA, will step up. He has delivered time and again, and he doesn’t shy away from those moments.”
Myles Turner
Haliburton is currently shooting 12 of 14 (86%) on shots to tie or win the game in the last two minutes of the fourth quarter or in overtime this season, including regular season and playoffs. That’s the best percentage in a single season since data collection began in 1996-97, according to ESPN Research.
That external motivation he speaks of has served as fuel, a driving factor in his flourishing career. But it has also weighed heavily on him, the constant pressure to respond to criticism has become a disproportionate influence on his mind, even after an appearance with Team USA last summer in which he joked about his lack of participation, and when the Pacers were below .500 for the first two months of the season as he struggled to meet expectations.
“It’s been a tough year,” Haliburton said. “Besides the year I got traded, the toughest year for me basketball-wise.
Tyrese Haliburton
“To arrive with so many expectations of myself, of the public, and then to have such a terrible start to the year and feel that there is so much pressure on me. At the beginning of the year, I didn’t even want to come to work.”
Under the joy and self-deprecating jokes, a wounded ego was hidden.
It was August 2024.
Although Haliburton knew he wasn’t one of the protagonists of a Team USA team with some of the best players of his generation and the previous one, he said that being on the bench during almost all of the Olympic Games was an “ego check”.
He played 26 minutes in the tournament, the least on the team, and did not play in either the semi-final or the final. Haliburton saw the online jokes and embraced them publicly, even posting a photo of himself with his gold medal on social media with a hint about his lack of playing time.
But in private, Haliburton was dealing with the shame of being a substitute for the first time in his career.
“They’re pulling my leg. How do I respond?”
“When the season starts, I think, ‘I’m going to go now’,” Haliburton said about his thought at that moment. “‘I’m going to come for you guys'”.
Tyrese Haliburton
But in reality, he had spent the first half of the summer, before the Olympics, rehabilitating from a hamstring injury from last year’s playoffs and then didn’t have time to follow his usual training regimen due to his time in Paris. He also wasn’t completely healthy at the start of the season and had to take care of his body after an offseason with limited free time.
His production declined: he averaged 17.8 points and 8.5 assists on 45% shooting at the All-Star break, missed the All-Star Game, and failed to regain the momentum that had ignited the Pacers’ run to the Eastern Conference Finals a year earlier.
“I’m back. I’m terrible. How the hell can I talk?” said Haliburton.
Tyrese Haliburton
“It got to the point where all that conversation was affecting me negatively for the first time in my life, which was strange. I’ve always been someone who seeks out that external negativity, and now it’s affecting me?”
Haliburton had always prided himself on being an “underdog”, since his days as an unrecruited high school player from Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
“Basketball has always made me happy,” he said. “And for the first time, I wasn’t happy.”
Tyrese Haliburton
For the All-Star break, Haliburton had already gone through more than half of what he considered a lost season. So, while his teammates celebrated in San Francisco, he boarded a plane to Playa del Carmen, Mexico, to escape: from himself and the game. He took a book to keep his mind away from basketball. He began meeting with the Pacers’ mental health team.
“Having all those expectations, I didn’t handle them the right way,” Haliburton said. “I had to be honest with myself. I feel like that’s the most important thing. I was suppressing it.”
Tyrese Haliburton
It served as a turning point. He averaged 20.6 points and 11.0 assists on 53% shooting in his last 21 regular season games. Meanwhile, the Pacers took off, winning 16 of those games to enter the playoffs as the fourth seed in the East. And with something to prove.
“Everyone said last year was a fluke,” Pacers guard Bennedict Mathurin said this week before the start of the Eastern Conference Finals. “We really didn’t forget things.”
Bennedict Mathurin
Haliburton stood at the free throw line, hands on his hips, and looked toward Rocket Arena. Although he was accustomed to opposing fans not being particularly thrilled to see him, he was surprised to hear this particular taunt from the sold-out crowd in Cleveland, even if it had become a familiar tune elsewhere.
With 21.1 seconds remaining in the second quarter of Game 2 of the Eastern Conference semifinals, Haliburton missed the first of two free throws, and the boisterous Cavaliers fans took the opportunity to celebrate at the guard’s expense.
OVERRATED, clap, clap, clap, clap clap. OVERRATED, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.
Two weeks earlier, an anonymous player poll published by The Athletic had named Haliburton as the league’s most overrated player.
So, of course, he thought, this chant would follow him on the road in Milwaukee, a team Indiana has played 19 times in the last two seasons, including twice in the playoffs, leading to some heated exchanges, or, perhaps, in New York, after he antagonized the Knicks during last year’s playoffs. But Cleveland?
“I didn’t know we had problems,” Haliburton said after the game.
Tyrese Haliburton
Just two quarters later, Haliburton made the crowd regret the mockery, and question its veracity.
Indiana had overcome a 20-point deficit in the first half and erased a seven-point one in the final 50 seconds.
Losing by two points at the end of the last quarter, Haliburton grabbed a rebound of his own missed free throw just outside the restricted area (in what the NBA would later recognize as a lane violation) and turned backwards. Splitting a double team of Ty Jerome and Donovan Mitchell, he stumbled towards the top of the key.
Jerome followed him, with Sam Merrill and Jarrett Allen lurking to Haliburton’s left and Max Strus to his right. He faked right, then crossed over to the left, momentarily disabling Jerome in front of him.
He stepped back and launched a 25-foot shot that went in with only 1.1 seconds remaining.
The crowd, stunned by disbelief, saw Haliburton jump across the middle of the court with his hands cupped below his waist; the reference was clear.
“Tyrese, he looks for it, in a certain sense, because that gets him going,” Turner said. “There are certain competitors I’ve seen in this league like that.”
Myles Turner
It was the second time this postseason that Haliburton had surprised his opponent after an overtime victory in Game 5 of the Pacers’ first-round series against the Bucks. He beat Giannis Antetokounmpo with a dribble for a layup to seal the series victory in the final seconds.
The Pacers have now won three games this postseason despite trailing by seven or more points in the final minute. Only one other team in the play-by-play era (since 1998) has won even one such game: the 2014 Thunder.
Only Haliburton and LeBron James (2018) have recorded multiple go-ahead field goals in the final two seconds in a single postseason in the play-by-play era.
After the first game, Haliburton tweeted: “OVERRATED”. He reiterated it on the podium after his victory in Cleveland.
The same James added his opinion on X, stating: “Where are those who said he was overrated??!!”, as well as other praise after the great shot.
“We expect Ty to make those shots,” Mathurin said in the locker room after Game 2.
Bennedict Mathurin
On the night Haliburton was traded from Sacramento to Indiana before the trade deadline in February 2022, he went to dinner with Pacers coach Rick Carlisle.
It was there that the veteran coach conveyed his plans for his new guard: how Indiana wanted to give Haliburton the ball with the freedom to run the offense on the court. Carlisle asked him how comfortable he felt making plays and remembers seeing Haliburton’s eyes light up.
“I was very excited about that,” Carlisle said on Thursday. “We had a couple of years where we were building and he had the opportunity to be in some of those situations, have success, go through some ups and downs and things like that.”
Rick Carlisle
From 2021 to 2023, Haliburton made 10 of 30 shots (4 of 22 from 3) on shots to tie the game in the last two minutes of the fourth quarter or in overtime. He attributes the repetitions he took when he first arrived in Indiana for helping to develop his current success in crucial moments.
“Baptism by fire, almost,” Haliburton said. “Doing that and now being in these situations where they obviously matter on a much bigger scale is important to me. Experience is the best teacher.”
Tyrese Haliburton
That experience has transformed him into a player the Pacers trust to execute in the most important moments of the game, said teammate Pascal Siakam, both for his ability to make the right play (Haliburton leads the playoffs with 9.5 assists per game) and because he wants the ball with the game on the line.
“My group wants me to take those shots,” Haliburton said. “My coaching staff wants me to take those shots. Our organization wants me to take those shots.
Tyrese Haliburton
“Everyone is living and dying with that at that moment. That gives me a lot of confidence.”
