The Indiana Pacers season hangs in the balance after Tyrese Haliburton slipped and injured his left hamstring while inadvertently doing the splits. He left the floor in significant pain while being carried off the floor by James Johnson and Buddy Hield with towels placed over his head as they made their way toward the locker room. He was announced to be out for the remainder of the game during halftime and will receive an MRI on Tuesday.
As I’m writing this, the Pacers are rallying in the third quarter, TJ McConnell is inspiring energy through the fieldhouse as they do their best to overcome the circumstances to beat the Boston Celtics (they would eventually win by a final score of 133-131). But none of it matters until we hear the MRI results of their burgeoning superstar, potential All-Star starting point guard’s hamstring, and get a timetable for his return.
Is this somehow a minor strain that keeps him out for only a couple weeks? A more serious strain that pushes him out for a couple months? The rest of the season? All of it is possible and the whole thing has to fill Pacers fans with an unfortunately all-too-familiar dread. The same dread that broke hearts when Paul George broke his leg during a team USA scrimmage before the first season of his max extension. The dread that swallowed hope whole when Victor Oladipo, fresh off of a sublime, surprise All-NBA season, ruptured his quad tendon.
The basketball gods have not been kind to the Indiana Pacers and their star players in the last decade and they may have been cruel in writing the script for this season as this injury has seemingly been foreshadowed since the home opener. Slips have been a problem for the Pacers and specifically Tyrese Haliburton since the very beginning of the season. On the first possession of the year, Haliburton slipped and fell hard on his elbow but avoided any injury.
The Pacers all were struggling to find their footing a few games later in the In-Season Tournament opener with the bright blue court causing Haliburton to slip multiple times including one where he grabbed at his groin near half-court. Once again though, he avoided any injury and came away unscathed but he was left wondering in the post-game press conference if other teams were having the same problems. The court was completely re-finished and came back without issue for two more games during the Pacers improbable IST run that sent the team to the championship game against the Lakers in Las Vegas.
This fucking sucks. Just no other way to put it. Hopefully, by some miracle, this is a relatively minor thing that keeps him out weeks … not months. And there’s that familiar dread again that came after TJ Warren became a human supernova in the Orlando Bubble during peak-pandemic times—looking like the forward the Pacers have needed since they traded PG—before a foot injury held him to just four games over the following two seasons.
For Haliburton, if the injury is something that keeps him out for more than a few weeks, he could be missing out on tens of millions of dollars. Haliburton has to play a minimum of 65 games to qualify for the All-NBA voting and he has to make one of the All-NBA teams this season for the maximum value of his contract to increase from $207 million to around $260 million.
It’s potentially the second straight season that a Haliburton winter injury derailed a terrific start to the year. Last year, the Pacers were 23-18 when he went down in the third quarter against the Knicks with an elbow strain. They lost nine of their next 10 after the injury and never recovered. This season, the Pacers are 21-15 including 7-4 against the top three teams in the eastern conference and remain tied for 4th with four other teams in the conference with the same record.
If Haliburton’s out a long time, the front office will have some tough decisions to make. This schedule in January remains an incredibly hard stretch and they could easily fall behind among that aforementioned group of five teams that’s all bunched together in the standings. If they look entrenched at the bottom of the play-in standings near the deadline, do they hold onto their veterans like Buddy Hield, Bruce Brown, and T.J. McConnell? Do they move back into another year of development mode with Jarace Walker and Ben Sheppard getting increased looks? Or do they hope that an easier schedule over the final few months will allow the players that remain to return the Pacers to the playoffs for the first time since Nate McMillan was still around? This would seem to make a trade for a wing like Pascal Siakam extremely unlikely unless it’s a minor strain.
Injuries do also bring about opportunity; George rose to stardom when Danny Granger missed an entire season (there’s that damn dread again) with a knee injury that he never really seemed to fully recover from. If the Pacers are going to survive their time without their superstar, however long that may be, they’ll need players like Bennedict Mathurin and Andrew Nembhard to make make major leaps in their development. But regardless of whether others are able to step up in his absence, for the time that Haliburton is out, so much joy will be missing from the game.
For now, we wait for MRI results and hope that the basketball gods will give the Indiana Pacers a fucking break for once.
iPacers 