OKLAHOMA CITY — You are Tyrese Haliburton.
You went to the Eastern Conference title series in last year’s NBA playoffs, but your team got swept. You went to the Paris Olympics last summer with the U.S. men’s basketball team and won a gold medal, but you didn’t play much. You came into this season with high expectations, but your Indiana Pacers got off to a 10-15 start. And on top of that, some of your peers evidently think you are overrated.
You got angry.
“I think as a group, we take everything personal,” Haliburton said. “It’s not just me. It’s everybody. I feel like that’s the DNA of this group.”
The anger fueled focus, the focus became confidence, and the confidence developed within the 6-foot-5, 185-pound point guard and his teammates delivered a 1-0 series lead in the NBA Finals. Haliburton’s penchant for last-second heroics — one of the biggest stories in this postseason — showed up again Thursday night, with his 21-foot jumper with three-tenths of a seconds left going into NBA Finals lore and giving the Pacers a 111-110 win over the heavily favored Oklahoma City Thunder.
The Pacers led for 0.0001% of that game. It was enough.
“When it comes to the moments, he wants the ball,” Pacers center Myles Turner said of Haliburton, a two-time NBA All-Star who was the No. 12 pick of the 2020 draft and played his first 1 1/2 seasons for the Sacramento Kings before being traded to Indiana in February 2022. “He wants to be the one to hit that shot. He doesn’t shy away from the moment, and it’s very important this time of the year to have a go-to guy. He just keeps finding a way, and we keep putting the ball in the right positions, and the rest is history.”
Haliburton is 4-for-4 in the final two seconds of final periods (fourth quarter and overtime) in these playoffs, with all of those shots either giving the Pacers a win or sending a game into overtime before they won it there. The rest of the NBA is a combined 4-for-26 in the same situation in these playoffs.
“YOU CAN’T MAKE IT UP,” guard Caitlin Clark of the WNBA’s Fever — possibly the only Indiana guard more beloved than Haliburton these days in the basketball-mad state — wrote on social moments after Haliburton hit his latest clock-beating thriller.
Haliburton is just 1-for-7 while trying to beat the clock in the first three quarters of games in these playoffs, but with the game on the line, he’s perfect. That’s a clutch shooter in the strictest sense.
“You don’t want to live and die with the best player on the other team taking a game winner with a couple seconds left,” Thunder guard Alex Caruso said.
No, especially when that best player on the other team is Haliburton. Just ask the Milwaukee Bucks, Cleveland Cavaliers or New York Knicks. They could have all told the Thunder who was going to take the big shot and what was probably going to happen.
Against the Bucks on April 29, it was his layup with 1.4 seconds left that capped Indiana’s rally from seven points down in the final 34.6 seconds of overtime. Final score: Pacers 119, Bucks 118, and that first-round series ended there.
In Cleveland on May 6, it was a 3-pointer with 1.1 seconds left for a 120-119 win, his shot capping a rally from seven points down in the final 48 seconds. Against the Knicks on May 21 at Madison Square Garden, a game the Pacers trailed 121-112 with 51.1 seconds left, he hit a jumper with no time left to force OT, and the visitors would win again.
All those plays came with a little something extra. His father, John Haliburton, got a little too exuberant with Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo after the win over Milwaukee and wasn’t allowed to come to the next few games, though the ban has since been lifted. Haliburton did a certain dance that the NBA doesn’t like much after the shot against the Cavs. And then he made a choke signal, referencing Pacers legend Reggie Miller’s gesture against the Knicks a generation earlier, after hitting the shot in New York.
On Thursday, though, he was all business. The NBA Finals are a long way from over, and he knows it. Game 2 is Sunday night in Oklahoma City before the best-of-seven series shifts to Indianapolis for the next two games.
“Again, another big comeback, but there’s a lot more work to do,” Haliburton said. “That’s just one game. And this is the best team in the NBA, and they don’t lose often. So we expect them to respond. We’ve got to be prepared for that. We’ve got a couple days to watch film, see where we can get better.”
Haliburton is in his first year of a supermax contract that will pay him close to $245 million along the way. He has the Olympic gold medal from last summer and surely will be a serious candidate to play for the Americans again when they’re the home team at the Los Angeles Games in 2028. He’s now a two-time All-NBA selection. And his legend as late-game postseason hero is already established at age 25.
Three more wins, and he’ll be an NBA champion as well.
The anger is gone. For obvious reasons, Haliburton was all smiles late Thursday night.
“Ultimate, ultimate confidence in himself,” Turner said. “Some players will say they have it, but there’s other players that show it, and he’s going to let you know about it, too. That’s one of the things I respect about him. He’s a baller and a hooper and really just a gamer.”
And in his NBA Finals debut, Haliburton reminded the world that’s the case.
“This group never gives up,” Haliburton said. “We never believe that the game is over until it hits zero, and that’s just the God’s honest truth. That’s just the confidence that we have as a group, and I think that’s a big reason why this is going on.”