The athletic: Pacers built – and around – Tyrese Haliburton, and Knicks can guarantee that it worked

Note from the publisher: Read more NBA reporting from The Athletic here. The views on this page do not necessarily reflect the views of the NBA or their teams.

* * *

NEW YORK – The ball pounds from the sidewalk, a real jump when you avoided the crack in the entrance.

Dribble to the left. Dribble to the right. Step back. Three … two … one … (Summer).

Who grew up with basketball and has the same scenario at home or in the local playground again and again, with a make-belief championship that drives on whether the shot has been received?

Tyresian Haliburton, like any other basketball player on Earth, used to run the same exercise as a child who grew up in Oshkosh, Wisc. Indiana Pacers' star said he used to be a game in the hallway of his child's house in the hallway – he would dribble a fake ball or maybe a sock, and the time ran and a “game” on the line.

Haliburton's exercise of such shots pays off. In the 2025 NBA playoffs, he has two game winners and an unlikely, one for eternity that will be played against the New York Knicks at the end of the regulation in game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals against the New York Knicks.

But Haliburton's most valuable clutch training was not in his house. It was in almost every NBA arena that he visited with Indiana in his first two seasons when the team stand-and the Pacers gave him the chance to shoot late shots, hoping that one day the real experience would pay off.

“To be honest when I was traded here, we weren't very good,” said Haliburton, according to his 31-point value of 11-assisted reggie-miller choke-hold in the 138-135 victory of the Pacers in game 1 against the Knicks.

“And so we would be in these moments when I would have to make a few shots, and I would miss them and it would not be interested in anyone,” said Haliburton. “Well, maybe Pacers fans -but we weren't very good, so it didn't matter. We were not a playoff team or something. So I have the feeling that (it was) baptism almost to do this to do that, and now we are now in these situations in which they are obviously important to a large scale, I think I am important for myself.”

The Pacers shifted the direction of their franchise at the 2022 trade closure, when they sent all-star Center Domante Sabonis and others to the Sacramento Kings for a package that focused on Haliburton into which Sacramento kings. Indiana is now in the final of the Eastern Conference for the second time in a row and has a 1-0 lead against the Knicks, since the Pacers built both Haliburton and also built with complementary players around him who were able to perform a style that is best suited for Haliburton's skills. The results are obvious and astonishing.

After the breathtaking comeback of the Pacers against the Knicks, in which Indiana decreased by 17 points in the fourth quarter, and in overtime on Haliburton Stepback 2-pointers at the Summer (he tried to shoot a 3, but his big toe was hardly on the 3-point line on which the Rim analysis analysis deal with a Wally. The suggested Haliburton was one of the best clutch players in this century.

On the day the Pacers exchanged against Haliburton, they were 19: 37 in the 13th place in the east and in his first full season the following year took Indiana 35-47 and 11th place. In this first full season with the Pacers in 2022-23, Haliburton appeared in 35 “coupling games” and scored 40 percent from the field (31 percent compared to 3-point range). In these situations, he achieved an average average of almost an assist for 0.1 sales, and the Pacers won 20 of the games. So he might have missed his appropriate proportion of clutch shots, but even then he did enough to have an impact on winning.

What Haliburton has done in the Pacers playoff so far reminds of a flowering period of LeBron James in the coupling. Haliburton won game 5 of the first round of the Pacers against the Milwaukee Bucks on a trip to the Hoop and game 2 in the conference semi-final against the Cleveland Cavaliers on a streptback-3 pointer.

The ball was against the Knicks in Haliburton's hands, about seven seconds and the Pacers at two o'clock. Haliburton dripped past the 3-point line and tried to step down for a game-winning shot behind it, but his toe did not clear the line. He didn't know that at the time, and when his shot came to the sky before he fell through the tire, he hit the Müller Choke celebration from the Pacers-Knicks-Playoff series and thought he had won the game.

The shot and the pose are what people talked about all day on Thursday, but the reality is that Haliburton was very good in these situations for practically his entire five -year career.

“I think the greatest thing for me is that I already have the trust of making the shot at the moment,” said Haliburton. “I have this trust from my group. My group helps me to take these recordings, my trainers and the staff who take these pictures. I think our organization wants me to take the pictures. I think we are now at the point where my fans help me to take this picture. I think everyone lives and dies with it. That gives me a lot of confidence.”

“He is our Maestro,” said Pacers striker Pascal Siakam. “He has the ball, he puts us in position and at the time 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 a constant template leader (or nearby). Therefore, it would make sense for the Pacers to surround him with similarly fast players who can shoot his passports of drives and 3S – what exactly the Indiana squad is currently.

But on Wednesday, the Pacers coach Rick Carlisle promoted the idea of ​​continuing to build himself in Haliburton when he said that the Pacers were able to urge his opponent for most of the defense game for most of the game, a factor for all big comebacks of the Pacers in this off -season.

“Since we put together this group in Tyrese, we had to make adjustments to develop an effective style for us,” said Carlisle. “It is a difficult style, you know, it is demanding, physically demanding, an enormous amount of WHARM as a athlete, and then you have to be super selfless.”

Andrew Nembhard, the security guard alongside Haliburton, is usually the point-man in the press of the Pacers Start. Aaron Nesmith, who is Nembhard like a robust wing defender, shot and achieved six consecutive 3 Series (an NBA playoff record) on Wednesday. When the Pacers exchanged against Siakam last season, he was seen as the perfect Yang by Haliburton's Yin, as sporty four who can drive the pace offensive.

The Pacers use these weapons – and a few more – to stage their comeback, and then they statistically have one of the ruthless conclusions of the NBA to end the game with a big shot. So they built up in Haliburton – for the situations in which the Pacers are now thriving.

“We are a team that is very dependent on each other,” said Carlisle. “Our style is a style in which the sum of the parts is larger than the individuals.”

But then he mentioned that the Pacers also have “great single players”, and he certainly had Haliburton boss among them. Who would he have made the last shot?

* * *

Joe Vardon is a senior NBA author of The Athletic, based in Cleveland. Follow Joe on Twitter @Joevardon