Tyrese Haliburton is the perfect NBA-Böse weight, and Knicks fans have a place in the front row for his latest show

One of the prevailing stories of the 2024-25 NBA season was the unofficial search for a new face of the league. Lebron James and Stephen Curry are getting older, and whether it was James or Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, the NBA was always best contextualized by an unspoken protagonist, and the standard they set has almost become too high for every modern player.

There is a disadvantage for everyone. Is Jayson Tatum entertaining enough? Can the small, cold Minneapolis market Anthony Edwards transmit far enough? Victor Wembanyama still has to appear in the playoffs. Nobody checked every box. There are almost too many of them. So James is the first quadragenarish to hold a position that we have not yet occupied. The NBA has not chosen its new hero.

But, and I mean it is possible in the cheapest way, it has found an absolutely perfect villain: Pacers Star Tyrese Haliburton. There is nothing on paper that you don't like about it. There are no controversy outside of time. He is not a dirty player. It is only in, mustache vertebrae on a basketball court. He is equal genius and showman, since he subtly undermines her with his basketball IQ, because he murdered her with 30-foot depths, and as soon as he has hit her, no matter who you are, he will dance on her grave.

We speak of a player who broke out the famous “Dame Time” celebration in the future Hall of Famer's face before even playing in a playoff game. None of us should have been surprised when he copied prematurely in Madison Square Garden in Madison Square Garden on Wednesday. This is the Haliburton experience in a nutshell. He can't wait to twist the knife.

He pushed a bit regretted to do this after game 2, but not because he showed up the kinks. Rather, he feared that he would have wasted it with a shot with games than a winner. We live in the most likeable era in NBA history. The players are now growing together on the Aau racing track. They are recruited together for the college and often only join together at a handful of schools, which means that tight bonds maintain their professional career. This has made rivalries less frequently and less frequently. It is a not insignificant part of the human drama from this company.

Perhaps the Haliburton makes it such a funny opposite force. A great villain is often misunderstood. Think that Draymond Green scores a career in the Hall of Fame as a second round pick goal for single-digit points every evening and his opponents mocked as he did. A player who does things differently has something particularly convincing who, despite more modest origins, develops a flare for the dramatic.

Haliburton was an overlooked three-star recruit. He was acted by his original team when they decided to keep another point guard about him. Even when he was selected for the team in the USA in the last low season, one of the greatest honors in the entire basketball, he was mocked because he rarely actually played. He could be awarded that he developed a chip on his shoulder a bit. Nobody put him in the spotlight, so he pressed there.

It would not be fair to describe the annual player survey of athletic as a villain. Haliburton was in this way for his entire career. But it illustrates everything we are talking about here. In April, a sample of 90 NBA players voted for the most overvalued player in basketball. It was obviously ridiculous at the time. Basically, he had enforced a thigh injury for a year. He had already brought a team to the conference finale, which an active MVP winner in Joel Embbiid has never done. He was on the best way to a second all-NBA selection.

However, the value of Haliburton is generated in a completely unorthodox way. He is not a bucket in the traditional sense. He is not the standard star Guard, who scores between 25 and 30 points every evening by striking unsuspecting defenders of the dribbling and nailing of contested mid-range jumpers. We don't think of that when we look at the protagonists in NBA history. The best player on the that probably contributed to the fact that so many players released him. And that's part of what makes it so funny.

Everyone can make a hard shot. What Haliburton did at the end of game 1 of the Eastern Conference final on Wednesday was more impressive and certainly more unique because it led to it. I want you to see yourself where he is on the pitch for three seconds.

Almost every other superstar who has the ball with three seconds in a game with two points in the color will try to force a layup. Really what you do is in the hope of drawing a foul. This is the type of chaos that invite situations at the end of the game. These moments are messy. You are desperate. The players don't think clearly.

What makes Haliburton so special is that he always thinks clearly. He is never rattled. He never loses his trust in himself. He never makes the wrong decision. How many players would have the bare essentials to see Mitchell Robinson in the color, to understand that there is no way to create a clean near the basket, and then again for a possible game winner on the street and rather an apparently “safer” game in less than three seconds? Because Haliburton did that, and that made this piece so special. While everyone else is panicked, he is calm, cool and collected, ready to play the greatest game of the game and then to remember how urgently it needed to give him this opportunity.

These are the players who make you angry if you don't wear your uniform. They are the ones who do things that their favorite players cannot do and never forget to remind them. And ultimately they are part of what #thisleague makes a pleasant world to fill.

The NBA is a television program. We tacitly admit that every time the league search for a new main character recognizes. But a TV show is much more than your leadership. It must be a rounded -out ecosystem full of convincing characters. And that is what Haliburton has become: an eternal outsider who rubs his triumph on the facies of his Ballyhoo colleagues. Giannis Antetokounmpo is probably a face of the league candidate. Donovan Mitchell plays like a traditional superstar. The Madison Square Garden is the stage on which these stars are crowned so often. And by rounds, Haliburton only tears out her hearts and stamps them into pieces.

And maybe that really needs the league forward. We cannot rely on another player is as good as James or Jordan, and every time we believe we have found one, we have a new reason to dismiss them. The mythology of the Fandom requires flawless heroes, and that makes faulty bad guys all the more convincing. Haliburton doesn't play like his competitors. He doesn't behave like her either. But he hits them all and laughs as he does, and is always a memorable character in the soap opera, which is professional basketball.