What’s fueling Tyrese Haliburton’s historic NBA playoff run?

THE BALL BOUNCED high in the air off the back of the rim as Tyrese Haliburton backpedaled across half court. He knew where it was about to land.

He had gotten exactly the shot he’d wanted, racing toward the basket with the middle of the floor open, before turning around and dashing back toward the 3-point line so he could slide into the step-back jumper. It has become his signature move.

He said he felt like the ball got stuck in the air, rising and falling along with the hopes of more than 19,000 raucous fans. As the ball slipped through the net, he also knew exactly how he wanted to commemorate the occasion.

He turned toward Reggie Miller — the Hall of Famer and Pacers legend-turned-TNT commentator — on the sideline, the two men now bonded through their mutual tormenting of this New York crowd. As he made his way toward him, Haliburton put his hands toward his throat, mimicking the now-iconic gesture Miller had taunted Knicks fans with 30 years prior, holding the pose as his teammates mobbed him at half court.

Haliburton thought he’d hit the game winner, but the replay would reveal his foot was on the line, sending the game into overtime; he admitted after the game he would have waited to unveil the celebration if he’d known the game wasn’t over. But Haliburton had paved the way for Indiana to complete the kind of improbable comeback the Pacers have started to make routine. After Indiana sealed the overtime victory, Haliburton shared a moment with Miller from across the court — a point and acknowledging glare from Miller, the torch passed from one troll to the next.

“Definitely a special time,” Haliburton said after the game. “Really cool he was in the building for that.”

The shot was his third game winner of the postseason. It wasn’t even his first go-round against the Knicks.

In Game 7 of the second round last season, Haliburton sparred with courtside Knicks fans, jawing at them as the Pacers’ lead grew to be insurmountable, invoking the torturous days when Miller was public enemy No. 1 at the Garden.

He then rolled into the postgame news conference smiling, donning a hoodie with the image of Miller’s infamous choking gesture toward Spike Lee and the New York crowd from 30 years earlier.

“I love external motivation,” Haliburton told ESPN earlier in the playoffs. “Somebody’s talking s— about me, I want to know because I want to respond. I want to go back at them.”

Indiana’s improbable victory on Wednesday gives it a 1-0 lead entering Game 2 of the Eastern Conference finals in New York on Friday night.

Haliburton sits at the front of all of it, his basketball DNA infiltrating every part of his team — the ball movement, the unrelenting trash talk and the poise to excel in the clutch.

“Ultimate self-confidence,” Pacers center Myles Turner told ESPN. “In this environment, a lot of guys like himself with that DNA, he’ll step up. He’s delivered time and time and time again, and he doesn’t shy away from those moments.”

Haliburton is now shooting 12-for-14 (86%) on game-tying or go-ahead shots in the final two minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime this season, regular season and playoffs. That’s the best percentage in a single season since tracking data began in 1996-97, according to ESPN Research.

That external motivation he speaks of has served as fuel, a driving factor in his blossoming career. But it has also weighed heavily on him, the constant pressure to respond to critics becoming an outsized influence in his mind, including after a Team USA appearance last summer in which he joked about his lack of participation, and when the Pacers sat below .500 through the first two months of the season as he struggled to live up to expectations.

“It’s been a tough year,” Haliburton told ESPN. “Outside of the year I got traded, the toughest year for me basketball-wise.

“Coming in with so much expectations from myself, from the public, and then having such a terrible start to the year and feeling like there’s all this pressure on me. Early in the year, I didn’t even want to come to work.”

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UNDERNEATH THE CHEERING and self-deprecating jokes lay a bruised ego.

It was August 2024.

Although Haliburton knew he wasn’t one of the headliners on a Team USA squad with some of the greatest players of his generation and the one before, he said being stuck on the bench for nearly the entire Olympic Games was an “ego check.”

He logged 26 minutes in the tournament, the fewest on the team, and did not play in either the semifinal or final. Haliburton saw the jokes online and publicly embraced them, even posting a picture of himself with his gold medal on social media with a dig at his lack of playing time.

But privately, Haliburton was grappling with the embarrassment of being benched for the first time in his career.

“I’m getting clowned. How do I respond?”

“When the season starts, I’m like, ‘I’m going to go now,'” Haliburton said of his thinking then. “‘I’m going to get back at y’all.'”

But in reality, he’d spent the first half of the summer, before the Olympics, rehabbing a hamstring injury from last year’s playoffs and then didn’t have time to go through his usual training regimen because of his time in Paris. He wasn’t completely healthy early in the season, either, and had to nurse his body back to health after an offseason with limited time off.

His production fell off — he averaged 17.8 points and 8.5 assists on 45% shooting by the All-Star break, missed the All-Star Game and failed to recapture the momentum that had ignited the Pacers’ run to the Eastern Conference finals a year prior.

“Come back in. I’m terrible. How the f— can I talk?” Haliburton said.

“It got to the point where all that conversation was weighing on me in a negative way for the first time in my life, which was weird. I have been somebody who seeks out that external negativity, and now it’s weighing on me?”

Haliburton had always prided himself on being an underdog, dating back to his days as an unrecruited high school player from Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

“Basketball has always made me happy,” he said. “And for the first time I wasn’t happy.”

By the All-Star break, Haliburton was more than halfway through what he’d deemed a lost season. So while his peers celebrated in San Francisco, he got on a plane to Playa Del Carmen, Mexico, to escape — from himself and the game. He brought a book to keep his mind off basketball. He started meeting with the Pacers’ mental health team.

“Having all those expectations, I didn’t handle them the right way,” Haliburton said. “I had to just be honest with myself. I feel like that’s the biggest thing. I was holding it in.”

It served as a pivot point. He averaged 20.6 points and 11.0 assists on 53% shooting in his final 21 games of the regular season. Meanwhile, the Pacers took off, winning 16 of those games to enter the playoffs as the No. 4 seed in the East. And with something to prove.

“Everybody was saying that last year was a fluke,” Pacers guard Bennedict Mathurin said this week before the start of the Eastern Conference finals. “We don’t really forget stuff.”

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HALIBURTON STOOD AT the free throw line, hands on his hips, and gazed across Rocket Arena. Though he was used to opposing fans not being particularly thrilled to see him, he was surprised he was hearing this particular jeer from the sold-out crowd in Cleveland, even if it had become a familiar tune elsewhere.

With 21.1 seconds remaining in the second quarter of Game 2 of the Eastern Conference semifinals, Haliburton missed the first of two free throws, and the raucous Cavaliers fans took the opportunity to celebrate at the guard’s expense.

OVER-RATED, clap, clap, clap, clap clap. OVER-RATED, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.

Two weeks earlier, an anonymous player poll released by The Athletic had named Haliburton as the league’s most overrated player.

So sure, he thought, this chant would follow him on the road in Milwaukee — a team Indiana has played 19 times over the past two seasons, including twice in the playoffs, which has led to some heated exchanges — or, perhaps, New York — after he antagonized the Knicks during last year’s playoffs. But Cleveland?

“I didn’t know we had beef,” Haliburton said after the game.

Just two quarters later, Haliburton made the crowd regret the taunt — and question its veracity.

Indiana had stormed back from a 20-point first-half deficit and erased a seven-point one in the final 50 seconds.

Trailing by two points late in the fourth quarter, Haliburton collected a rebound on his own missed free throw just outside the restricted area (in what the NBA would later acknowledge was a missed lane violation) and turned backward. Splitting a Ty Jerome–Donovan Mitchell double-team, he stumbled back toward the top of the key.

Jerome followed him, with Sam Merrill and Jarrett Allen lurking on Haliburton’s left and Max Strus on his right. He faked right, then crossed over left, momentarily disabling Jerome in front of him.

He stepped back and launched a 25-footer that rattled in with just 1.1 seconds remaining.

The crowd, stunned in disbelief, watched Haliburton skip around at midcourt with his hands cupped below his waist — the reference was clear.

“Tyrese, he searches it out, in a sense, because it gets him going,” Turner said. “There’s certain competitors I’ve seen in this league like that.”

It was the second time this postseason Haliburton had shocked his opponent after an overtime winner in Game 5 of the Pacers’ first-round series against the Bucks. He beat two-time MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo off the dribble for a layup to seal the series win in the final seconds.

The Pacers have now won three games this postseason despite trailing by seven or more points in the final minute. Only one other team in the play-by-play era (since 1998) has won even one such game — the 2014 Thunder.

Only Haliburton and LeBron James (2018) have recorded multiple go-ahead field goals in the final two seconds in a single postseason in the play-by-play era.

“OVERRATE THAT,” Haliburton tweeted after the first round and reiterated at the podium after his winner in Cleveland.

James himself added his take on X, stating “Where the lames who said he was overrated??!!” as well as other praise after the big shot.

“We expect Ty to make those shots,” Mathurin said in the locker room after Game 2.

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ON THE NIGHT Haliburton was traded from Sacramento to Indiana before the trade deadline in February 2022, he went to dinner with Pacers coach Rick Carlisle.

It was there that the veteran coach relayed his plans for his new guard — how Indiana wanted to give Haliburton the ball with the freedom to run the offense on the floor. Carlisle asked him how comfortable he was making playcalls and remembers seeing Haliburton’s eyes light up.

“He was really enthusiastic about that,” Carlisle said Thursday. “We had a couple of years where we were building and he had the opportunity to get in some of those situations, have success, go through some ups and downs and things like that.”

From 2021 through 2023, Haliburton shot 10-for-30 (4-for-22 from 3) on game-tying shots in the final two minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime. He credits the reps he took when he first arrived at Indiana for helping to develop his current success in the clutch.

“Baptism by fire, almost,” Haliburton said. “To do that and now be in these situations where obviously they matter on such a bigger scale is important for me. Experience is the best teacher.”

That experience has transformed him into a player the Pacers trust to execute in the most important moments of the game, his teammate Pascal Siakam said, both for his ability to make the right play — Haliburton leads the playoffs at 9.5 assists per game — and because he wants the ball with the game on the line.

“My group wants me to take those shots,” Haliburton said. “My coaching staff wants me to take those shots. Our organization wants me to take those shots. I think now we’re at the point where our fans want me to take that shot.

“Everybody’s living and dying with it at that point. That gives me a lot of confidence.”