The Indiana Pacers quietly had the 4th-best record in the league after their 10-15 start to the season amidst Tyrese Haliburton’s struggles. The playoffs bring another opportunity for the team and their star point guard to remind the world just how good they can be.
“You’re having a down year” was a recent attempt at trash talk by Trendon Watford to Tyrese Haliburton after an Indiana Pacers win over the Brooklyn Nets.
While the absurdity of a role player on a tanking team telling a star point guard of a playoff team with counting stats that he can only dream of that he’s having a down year is amusing, Watford’s not alone in the NBA world thinking that this year hasn’t been going well for Haliburton. To an extent, you can understand why—especially when national media members openly admit they aren’t watching Indiana play. Haliburton’s start to the season was nightmare fuel.
“I’ve erased the first 15 games from my memory,” Haliburton said the Pacers beat the Rockets in early March, “… I have a lot of games this year that I’m not proud of at all. We played Houston today. We were getting ready for this game watching their last couple of games and then we watched our last time playing them. That doesn’t even look like me on the floor.”
In those first 15 games, the Pacers were 6-9 and their superstar looked like a shell of himself after being unable to workout in the summer after reaggravating his hamstring injury in the Olympics according to trainer Drew Hanlen. He averaged 15.3 points, 8.5 assists with abysmal shooting splits of 37.5/28.4/82.0.
“I got too caught up in outside noise and allowing myself to think such negative thoughts about myself internally,” Haliburton told The Athletic in January. “It was the first time in my life that I had real self-doubt behind everything I was doing. … I feel like my personal struggles were leading to the team’s struggles.”
Since then however, he’s quietly risen back into the All-NBA conversation where he belongs and many advanced metrics scream out for him in a way that makes him feel vastly underrated.
In BBall Index’s LEBRON WAR metric, Tyrese Haliburton is 6th in the league behind some consensus All-NBA 1st-teamers Nikola Jokic, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Jayson Tatum. On Basketball Reference, Haliburton is 6th in overall win shares, 7th in Box Plus/Minus, and 4th in VORP. He ranks 11th in EPM from Dunks and Threes, 7th among players that played enough games to qualify for All-NBA. Keep in mind that all of these rankings are despite that awful initial stretch to start the season. That’s how good he’s been since then.
In counting stats terms, in his last 58 games of the season, Haliburton averaged 19.5 points and 9.5 assists to just 1.6 turnovers with shooting splits of 49.9/41.5/86. While the team success still took 10 more games as the team’s best defenders Andrew Nembhard and Aaron Nesmith were recovering from injury, the Pacers had the NBA’s 4th best record after a 10-15 start at 40-17 and no player is more important to their team’s success than Haliburton.
“I think he took his licks at the beginning of the year,” said teammate Myles Turner said after a game following the All-Star break. “He took on a lot of unnecessary pressure. And he weathered the storm. When he gets hot, it’s a fun night. He’s starting to find his stride.”
Even as he picked up his play, we didn’t see Haliburton at his peak level until after the All-Star break where he was able to relax on a beach, binge watch The Wire (season two is underrated according to the Pacers star), and have a rare period of rest for his body.
“It’s been an up and down year for me offensively. There’s been a lot of games where I might not have asserted myself enough or just overthinking not shooting enough, passing up good shots,” Haliburton said after the first game back. “… My trainer Drew is always on me to shoot the ball more and be more aggressive because good things happen when I’m aggressive and getting paint touches and really shooting the ball. So I’m just trying to pay attention to it and be as good as I can, keep learning every game. People say low lows and high highs. I feel like I’ve had a lot of low lows and not high highs just like whatever is in the middle. I feel like I haven’t had many games this year where I feel like I was really good offensively. That’s the great part of having the All Star Break, being able to kick my feet up, relax, and reflect on what the year has looked like for me and how I can be better moving forward.”
Immediately following that statement, Haliburton went supernova for a long stretch, looking like the same player that emerged onto the national scene at the start of last season. In the 21 games after the All-Star break he averaged 20.6 points, 11 assists with shooting splits of 53.3/43.9/86.4. It didn’t matter the defense he faced whether he was forcing teams to abandon their typical drop coverage like when they beat the Clippers, picking double teams apart and allowing the Pacers to play 4-on-3 all night like he did in a road win against the Nuggets, or just dealing with full-court pest defenders all night.
“He’s learned how to adjust to all the different defenses,” his coach Rick Carlisle said in March. “Tonight it’s big physical guys, other nights it’s guys that are denying him 94-feet, other nights it’s double teams, other nights it’s physical play, teams taking liberties and stuff like that. He’s adjusted to everything, has a great feel for when he’s got it going to keep the run going and when to get other guys involved. The balance has been great.”
Haliburton has been taking whatever the defense throws at him and feasting while making sure everybody eats all while almost never turning the ball over. Just 1.2 turnovers per game post All-Star break is an absurd number for a guy that casually throws bounce alley oop passes and is always looking to add a little flair as he racks up assists. When comparing him to other guards competing for those final All-NBA spots, this is where Haliburton’s case should be a slam dunk for voters. Not only is he more efficient with his shotmaking, he simply takes far better care of the ball than anyone on the planet (James Harden, Cade Cunningham, and Trae Young are leading the league with well over 4 turnovers per game).
“There isn’t much he hasn’t seen at this point. I think he does a great job of dissecting these defenses and whatnot. He’s in a flow state right, he’s very defiant, he’s very vocal too,” Turner said recently. “That’s one thing that’s helping us. One thing I told him before the break was ‘Help me, help you’ and he’s been doing a great job of that, telling me exactly what he needs. Our synergy has grown a lot and we’re playing well off each other.”
Another thing that’s gone under the radar for Haliburton is the improvement on the defensive end. This has been evident since the start of the season with Haliburton competing on that end much more than in past seasons and that extra effort alone has shown up on multiple occasions. He’s always shown the ability to make plays in passing lanes and rack up steals and that has continued. Post All-Star break, he forced more turnovers in this way (37 steals) than he committed on the other side (26). An insane statistic for a player that’s an offensive engine. But it’s more than just event creation of steals and blocks that has been their his entire career, his D-LEBRON from BBall Index is a career high and improved from -1.08 (very bad) to just slightly in the negatives at -0.1 (average). His increased performance on that end has been key in the Pacers being the NBA’s 7th-best defense after their 10-15 start.
Now it’s playoff time, another chance for Haliburton to succeed on a big stage and remind everyone exactly what level of player is leading the Indiana Pacers. Playoffs bring out the strategy of a specific matchup that the hectic regular season schedule often doesn’t allow. Haliburton had this to say about a one off game against the Rockets and their coaching staff and how much he enjoys this aspect of basketball.
“It’s the game within the game. Every game I enjoy the challenge and the chess match with opposing players and opposing coaches,” Haliburton said after the Pacers beat the Rockets. “That’s what I really love about the game of basketball. Coming down, I didn’t know how they were going to match up. Ime (Udoka) is really interesting, really a genius defensive mind. Coming into the game, I was prepared for them maybe putting Sengun on somebody else, how they were going to matchup. I was trying to find the right way to make plays and thought I really got myself going in the first half and towards the end of the first half, start of the second half I could really start to feel that a blitz was coming, so I just tried to make the right play as many times as I could. That’s the beautiful part of our game is now they are blitzing, I get to do what I really like to do: pass the ball and make reads. Every game is a little different, the defenders are a little bit different. Some games teams might switch one through five, some teams might blitz one through five, some teams might be in a heavy drop, be at the level. Every team poses something different and I just have to be prepared for whatever that is.”
For the Pacers first-round opponent in the Bucks, it’ll be interesting to see how they approach their coverage of Haliburton. Will Lopez be in a deep drop that seems like the comfort zone for Haliburton and Turner? They may after Turner shot an uncharacteristically low 3 for 18 in the last two games against Milwaukee. Will they try and survive switching Lopez onto Haliburton? Will they try and blitz the ball out of Haliburton’s hands to make someone else beat them? Will go zone as often as possible to muck up the Pacers offense like they did in December to make a second-half comeback? It’s the joy of the playoffs. The adjustments from game to game, half to half.
“We’re always going to get their best shot, they’re always going to get our best shot,” Haliburton said after practice Tuesday of the facing the Bucks in the playoffs again. “Plain and simple, we don’t like each other. That’s just part of it.”
For the Pacers it’s a new challenge of needing to protect homecourt to start a series after starting all three series on the road and going a combined 1-5 in the opening set of games. Haliburton admitted they eased into the playoffs last year and had to respond after getting killed in game one against the Bucks and they don’t have that luxury to waste a game at home to start this series.
They called this a down year. 50 wins and homecourt in the first round says otherwise. They called last year’s playoff run to the conference finals a fluke. Guess it’s time to dispel that one as well.
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