Tyrese Haliburton delivered another clutch performance in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals — a buzzer-beating shot to send the game to OT — finishing with 31 points, 11 assists.
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NEW YORK — The ball pounds off the pavement, a true bounce if you’ve avoided the crack in the driveway.
Dribble left. Dribble right. Step back. Three … two … one … (buzzer sound).
Who grew up playing basketball and didn’t run through that same scenario, at home or the local playground, over and over again, with a make-believe championship riding on whether the shot went in?
Tyrese Haliburton, like every other basketball player on Earth, used to run through the same drill as a child growing up in Oshkosh, Wisc. The Indiana Pacers star said he used to pretend a game was on the line in the hallway of his childhood house — he’d dribble a pretend ball or maybe a sock, with time running down and a “game” on the line.
Haliburton’s practicing such shots is paying off. He has two game winners so far in the 2025 NBA playoffs and an improbable, one for the ages, game-tying shot at the end of regulation in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals against the New York Knicks on Wednesday.
But Haliburton’s most valuable clutch practice wasn’t at his house. It was in just about every NBA arena he visited in his first two seasons with Indiana when the team stunk — and the Pacers gave him the chance to shoot late shots in the hope that one day the real-world experience would pay off.
“To be honest with you, when I got traded here, we weren’t very good,” Haliburton said after his 31-point, 11-assist, Reggie-Miller-choke-hold performance in the Pacers’ 138-135 win in Game 1 over the Knicks.
“And so we would be in these moments where I would have to take a few shots, and I would miss them, and nobody would care,” Haliburton said. “Well, maybe Pacers fans would — but we weren’t very good, so it didn’t matter. We weren’t a playoff team or anything. So I feel like (it was) baptism by fire, almost, to do that, and then now we’re in these situations where obviously they matter on a bigger scale, I think is important to me.”
The Pacers shifted the direction of their franchise at the 2022 trade deadline when they sent All-Star center Domantas Sabonis and others to the Sacramento Kings for a package that centered around Haliburton. Indiana is now in the Eastern Conference finals for the second consecutive year, and hold a 1-0 lead over the Knicks, because the Pacers both built Haliburton up and also built around him with complementary players who could execute a style that is best suited for Haliburton’s skill set. The results are obvious and astounding.
In the aftermath of the Pacers’ stunning comeback against the Knicks in which Indiana trailed by 17 points in the fourth quarter and sent it to overtime on Haliburton’s stepback 2-pointer at the buzzer (he was trying to shoot a 3 but his big toe was barely on the 3-point line) that hit the back of the rim, soared into the sky, and fell softly through the hoop, the analytics web site Opta Analyst published a study that suggested Haliburton was one of the best clutch players in the NBA this century. The study showed that Haliburton’s .564 effective field goal percentage in 184 “clutch” games — the score is within six points in the last five minutes of regulation or overtime — is the eighth-best in the last 25 years, but No. 1 among All-Stars. The site also said Haliburton’s nearly four-to-one assist-to-turnover ratio in the clutch is easily the best among any All-Star.
The day the Pacers traded for Haliburton, they were in 13th place in the East at 19-37, and in his first full season the following year Indiana finished 35-47 and in 11th place. For that first full season with the Pacers in 2022-23, Haliburton appeared in 35 “clutch” games and shot 40 percent from the field (31 percent from 3-point range). He averaged nearly one assist to 0.1 turnovers in those situations, and the Pacers won 20 of the games. So he might have missed his fair share of clutch shots, but even then, he was making enough to have an impact on winning.
What Haliburton has done in the Pacers’ playoff run so far is reminiscent of a LeBron James heyday performance in the clutch. Haliburton won Game 5 of the Pacers’ first-round series against the Milwaukee Bucks on a drive to the hoop, and Game 2 in the conference semis against the Cleveland Cavaliers on a stepback 3-pointer.
Against the Knicks, the ball was in Haliburton’s hands with about seven seconds remaining and the Pacers trailing by two. Haliburton dribbled past the 3-point line and tried to step back behind it for a game-winning shot, but his toe didn’t quite clear the line. He didn’t know that at the time, and so when his shot bounded toward the heavens before falling through the hoop, he hit the Miller choke celebration from past Pacers-Knicks playoff series, thinking he’d won the game.
The shot and the pose are what people talked about all day on Thursday, but the reality is Haliburton has been very good in these situations for virtually his entire five-year career.
“I think that the biggest thing for me is I already have the confidence to take the shot in the moment,” Haliburton said. “I have that confidence from my group. My group helps me to take those shots, my coaches, staff helps me take those shots. I think our organization wants me to take the shots. I think now we’re at the point where my fans help me take that shot. I think everybody’s living and dying with it at that point. That gives me a lot of confidence.”
“He’s our maestro,” Pacers star forward Pascal Siakam said. “He has the ball, he is putting us in position, and at those times he wants the ball in his hands and we want the ball in his hands.”
Haliburton is one of the fastest players in the NBA and is a perennial assists leader (or close to it). So, stylistically, it would make sense for the Pacers to surround him with similarly fast players who can catch his passes off of drives and shoot 3s — which is precisely the roster Indiana has at present.
But on Wednesday, Pacers coach Rick Carlisle advanced the idea of building around Haliburton further when he said achieving that goal was how the Pacers wound up with a team capable of pressing its opponent for most of the game on defense, a factor in all the Pacers’ huge comebacks this postseason.
“As we’ve put this group together around Tyrese, we’ve had to make adjustments to develop a style that was effective for us,” Carlisle said. “It’s a difficult style, you know, it’s demanding, physically demanding, takes a tremendous amount of wherewithal as an athlete and then you got to be super unselfish.”
Andrew Nembhard, the guard playing next to Haliburton, is usually the point man on the Pacers’ full-court press. Aaron Nesmith, who like Nembhard is a rugged wing defender, shot and made six consecutive 3s in the fourth quarter on Wednesday (an NBA playoff record). When the Pacers traded for Siakam last season, he was viewed as the perfect yang to Haliburton’s yin, as an athletic four who can push the pace offensively.
The Pacers use these weapons — and then some — to stage their comebacks, and then they have, statistically, one of the NBA’s most ruthless closers to finish the game with a big shot. That’s how they built around Haliburton — for the very situations in which the Pacers are now thriving.
“We’re a team that’s very reliant on one another,” Carlisle said. “Our style is a style where the sum of the parts is greater than the individuals.”
But then he mentioned the Pacers have “great individual players,” too, and he surely counted Haliburton chief among them. Who else would he have take the last shot?
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Joe Vardon is a senior NBA writer for The Athletic, based in Cleveland. Follow Joe on Twitter @joevardon
