After their loss to the Milwaukee Bucks dropped the Indiana Pacers to 6-10, Tyrese Haliburton was despondent in the visiting locker room, unable to come up with answers for what’s causing his disastrous start to the season.
“You’ve now had awhile to be working through this,” IndyStar beat reporter Dustin Dopirak asked Haliburton. “Do you have a better sense of what’s holding you back?”
“No, no, I don’t,” a dejected Haliburton answered.
While Haliburton finished with 18 points and 9 assists behind a strong second half, he didn’t consider it a step in the right direction as the Pacers lost their fifth game of their last six and fell outside of the play-in at 11th in the conference.
“It’s part of it. It’s part of basketball,” Haliburton said when asked how he was handling his struggles mentally. “I just got to keep trusting myself, working hard, trusting my teammates, and I’ll figure it out.”
While Haliburton once again declined to offer an injury as a possible reason for his early season inconsistencies, no one watching him could feel like they are seeing a healthy version of the player that was lighting defenses on fire throughout the first few months of 2023-24 or even the version that led the Pacers to the conference finals while battling back issues. It’s gotten to the point where you start to wonder if the team should consider shutting him down for a period of time to see if rest is what’s needed.
While Haliburton has not been listed on any injury report this season and no one in the organization has indicated that there is a lingering issue, actions speak louder than words, and his actions during and after some of these recent games do not appear to be those of a healthy man.
Unfortunately, Haliburton’s shortcomings have been plentiful and broadcast to the world this season, which has not been kind to him thus far. It does not take a rocket scientist to determine how poorly he has played. Through 15 games, Haliburton’s true shooting percentage of 50% ranks 17th-worst in the league among players playing over 20 minutes per game. Additionally, his three-point percentage of 28.4% with 7.7 attempts per game is the 3rd-worst in the league out of anyone to take five or more three-point attempts per game. Long story short, Tyrese Haliburton couldn’t shoot a brick into the ocean with binoculars.
With the Pacers already so short-handed with injuries to Ben Sheppard, Andrew Nembhard, Aaron Nesmith, and multiple centers, they’d be hard-pressed to sit their star at this crucial point in the season with only TJ McConnell available to run the offense. But as it stands, Haliburton’s presence on the court hasn’t been beneficial in his current state.
Per Cleaning the Glass, when Haliburton steps OFF the floor, Indiana’s offense improves by 5.5 points per 100 possessions and their defense gives up 3.6 less points per 100 possessions. That net increase of 9.1 points with Number Zero on the bench with his back pad on puts him in the 17th percentile. It goes without saying that Haliburton was Indiana’s engine last season and they looked completely lost without him (Pacers gained 6.7 points with him ON the floor, 80th percentile), as opposed to looking lost with him this season.
Through these last six games, every Placers player in the regular rotation has posted a plus/minus of -5 or less, except for TJ McConnell, the only positive Pacer with a +36.
And the Pacer with the worst plus/minus? Tyrese Haliburton, with a whopping -62, meaning that Indiana has been outscored by 62 points whenever Tyrese Haliburton is on the court.
Beyond his shot disappearing, his biggest problem, however, is his current style of play and how limited he looks on the floor. If you have watched even one Pacers game this season, you have probably seen Tyrese Haliburton fail to take advantage of a big man guarding him on the perimeter or drive to the rim with a layup available only to wildly jump and spin to pass it out to someone on the perimeter.
Looking at this clip is quite depressing, as a drive against a poor rim defender in Alperen Şengün is something Tyrese Haliburton would be licking his chops at last season. Instead, he never considered the path to the rim as he gave up on a transition sequence and threw a 180 turnaround pass to Bennedict Mathurin at the three-point line to essentially reset the play.
For comparison, here’s Quenton Jackson attacking a mismatch and getting an And-1 layup over Sengun. It’s hard to watch the 2-way player’s aggressiveness and not wonder where these kinds of plays have been from Haliburton.
Looking at the stats to put everything into perspective gives Pacers fans a dark glance into reality. Before his hamstring injury against Boston in January 2024, Haliburton averaged 14.7 drives per game in the first 33 games of the 2023-24 season. On these drives, he was shooting 60% from the field and passing it out 51.6% of the time, with these drives resulting in points 57% of the time. However, in the first 15 games of the 2024-25 season, Haliburton’s drives have slowed to 11.6 per game on 51% shooting. His drives only result in points 40.8% of the time, and he is passing it out 75.5% of the time despite averaging fewer assists per drive than last season, part of which must be due to his higher turnover percentage.
His lack of burst and energy was on full display in the Houston game, as Haliburton looked slow on both ends of the floor, moving with his head down, slow to react to passes, and feeling more comfortable moving, or perhaps shuffling without the ball.
With these stats and pieces of video evidence showing a clear lack of burst and drive on Haliburton’s part, it’s fair to wonder if he’s still affected by playing through his hamstring injuries last season. After all, if we turn the clock back to January, we remember that Haliburton returned quite early from his hamstring injury against Portland to play with Pascal Siakam in his first game with the team. When he was initially diagnosed with a Grade 1 Hamstring Strain on January 9, Haliburton was set to be re-evaluated by team doctors in two weeks. However, Haliburton returned prematurely on January 19 to play with Pascal Siakam in his first game as a Pacer. While Haliburton played like his usual self that game, logging 21 points and 17 assists in a 115-118 loss but aggravated the injury during the team. After this return, the problems started, with Haliburton playing poorly on a minutes restriction and his 3-point slump began, which brings us to the current day.
Part of why Haliburton returned so early from his hamstring injury last season was to meet the NBA’s 65-game requirement to be eligible for All-NBA teams and lock in his supermax contract, which he did behind his meteoric rise to start the season. Perhaps, the mental part of things just haven’t recovered from where he was at that point either.
“Early in the year I was in such a good place mentally, physically—the best place I’ve ever been in my career,” Haliburton told GQ Sports this summer. “Just feeling like I woke up, went to the gym every day, like, nobody can fuck with me, you know? It’s just kind of where my mentality was.”
Haliburton told GQ that his hamstring injury “kind of hindered everything else, because now I’m thinking twice about everything.”
The mind recovering from a physical ailment is an underrated part of a player’s recovery. Jeremy Lin talked about realizing how his mental state had collapsed completely after his body had recovered from after two season-ending injuries once he was back to being the leader of his team playing in China.
Fortunately for the Pacers, there is no sign that Haliburton’s mind is anywhere near Lin’s low level of self-confidence where he was “scared” of making mistakes and even coming into the game in 4th quarters. In fact, clutch moments have been where Haliburton has looked most like himself and he’s risen to the occasion in just about every win the Pacers have this year and almost saved a few losses. His numbers when the score is within five points in the game’s last five minutes: 10 for 21 overall (47.6%), 7 for 14 (50%) from 3, 9 assists, and just one turnover. When the Pacers have needed him in close games, he’s shown up over and over again.
Despite many claiming in bad faith that this poor start is proof that last year was a fluke and the Pacers wasted $244 million last offseason on a false hope of a franchise player while ignoring how good Haliburton had been even prior to last season’s unbelievable start, those stats, the film, and the painful expressions are not the doings of a healthy player, and sooner rather than later, it may be time for Haliburton and the Pacers staff to realize that and sit out as many games as he needs for his health.
“I’m gonna be around for a long time,” Haliburton told GQ sports on his success last year, “and I have full faith in that. and I gotta prove that, of course, but I guess my biggest thing is, like: this is not a one-time thing, by any means.”
As it stands, Aaron Nesmith is projected to be out until sometime in December but has been seen working out some without his walking boot, while Nembhard may be getting close to returning two weeks after he was declared out and has started increasing the intensity of his workouts. Assuming all goes well, Indiana may have two of their best defenders and their second-best playmaker back in action by the first week of December. Ben Sheppard, on the other hand, is slated to come back any game now.
Once Indiana gets its three best defenders back, along with its second-best playmaker and only other point guard outside of Haliburton and McConnell, Haliburton and the Pacers’ medical staff need to ask themselves if it is worth keeping him active. Sure, he hasn’t been listed on any injury report, and nobody has spoken about any injury holding him back, including Haliburton himself, but actions speak louder than words. Suppose worst comes to worst, and Haliburton has to sit out upwards of 10 or 15 games this season. In that case, Indiana should be able to tread water over the next few weeks with Pascal Siakam, Myles Turner, and Bennedict Mathurin leading the charge and Nembhard and McConnell running the show. Figuring out how to get Haliburton back to being himself is important far beyond just this season and if there is one year to be bad, this is the one, as Toronto holds Indiana’s first-round pick in the 2026 Draft. If Tyrese Haliburton is still playing at this putrid level by then, may God help us all.
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