ANOTHER MVP EVENING FOR SGA, WHO LOVES KOBE, WHILE HALIBURTON CRASHES
A man who makes history — in the final five seconds — only had five points early in the fourth quarter Sunday, which has to bother the Indiana Pacers as they're lucky to be tied 1-1 with Oklahoma City
So, timekeepers, what about the other 47 minutes and 55 seconds? In the final five seconds of the fourth quarter or overtime, Tyrese Haliburton has made four shots this NBA postseason, as you probably know. They were calling him HaliJordan and HaliCurry. He has changed all perceptions via his mechanism of burying a ball before the buzzer.
Sunday night, he had exactly five points with less than 10 minutes to play. Five. He is the primary reason why the Indiana Pacers lost Game 2 of the NBA Finals, 123-107 — and it is not the first time Haliburton has crashed after saving his team. The fluctuating state of his scoring has a way of driving people bonkers. Why did he require so much time to gather himself against the Thunder, scoring mere blobs in garbage time?
“I’ve got to do a better job. I’ve got to be better earlier in games,” Haliburton said. “We felt like we let the rope slip in the second quarter. You can digest what’s in front of you. We focus on a day at a time. We wanted to play better than we did tonight. They’re really physical. They’re giving me different looks. They’re flying around, and they have great rim protectors. It’s still a race, first to four.”
It is not a concern fans have in those blue Oklahoma City t-shirts, the ones that said “LOUD CITY.” They never care about the consistency of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who scored 34 points with eight assists — that’s 56 points — and helped shut down Haliburton defensively in what truly was an MVP performance. There was such little worry about Tyrese’s fourth killer shot, with 0.3 seconds left Thursday night, a tornado warning was ignored. If other locals were asked to move to low floors for protection, safety wasn’t necessary in Paycom Center. The great plains are back to normal, with the series equal at 1-1 with the next two games in Indianapolis.
There was SGA, who has scored 30 points with five assists on 11 occasions in these playoffs. He is tied historically with which players: Michael Jordan and LeBron James. SGA has scored at least 30 points at home on nine occasions, tying him all-time with Wilt Chamberlain. When the world was finished talking about Haliburton’s bombs, Gilgeous-Alexander issued another reminder that he is the best player on the planet. At one point, he razzed fellow Canadian Bennedict Mathurin with a “too small” taunt. Why not?
“You have to continue to stay focused on the task at hand. You have to lock in,” he said. “To make it this far in the season, it’s going to take a special display of focus. You need to not just throw the first punch. You have to throw all punches.”
“We’ve got the MVP, clearly,” teammate Chet Holmgren said. “A lot of MVPs don’t win a ring. We have five dudes out there. We all have to get it done.”
SGA was a leader in the first quarter, when he needed to yank Holmgren and Jalen Williams out of Game 1 holes and took just five shots. Next thing we knew, he and his team were so harmonious that we were replaying what he said about Kobe Bryant, his idol and the reason he is playing basketball. As a personality, he is the polar opposite of Bryant, who oozed of flamboyance. As a player? “There are a lot of similarities there,” Williams said. “I feel like if you are really paying attention to basketball and watch the way he plays, it’s a lot of similarities.”
“That’s probably my favorite player of all time,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “I never got the chance to meet him, but not only me, for kids all across the world, his influence has gone through the roof because of the competitor and the basketball player that he was. Hopefully, I’m somewhere close to that as a basketball player one day. But he was a special talent, a special person, and God rest his soul.”
Like Bryant, he easily forgot Haliburton’s blast, which happened after his own miss. “Yeah, they are easy to put away now,” he said. “There was a time in my career where it wasn’t, and you grow and learn through that. I’ve just grown to learn, like, you control what you can control. I shot the ball, I missed it. It’s written in history. There’s nothing I can do now. That is a missed shot, and all I can do is try to be better the next shot. That’s what I focus on. That’s my mindset. At this point, it’s like second nature.”
For two days, Haliburton had fun with his heroics. He tried to mock old critics, saying, “My jumper is unorthodox. That’s the way it looks. It has been criticized, the way the game is digested by fans sometimes. I think it’s a lot of boxscore watchers.”
What are the boxscore watchers saying today? He also had five turnovers to go with 17 points. His coach, Rick Carlisle, wouldn’t delve into Haliburton’s problems when he said the Pacers “played poorly” in the first half and “ a little better” in the second half. “There was a lot more to the game that just scoring,” he said. “Everyone has got to do more. It starts with the best players. It goes from there. If people are looking at points and assists, just on that, that’s not how our team is built. We are an ecosystem that has to function together. Who gets them, how they get them, it doesn’t matter.”
Oh, it matters.
If Haliburton is the Face of the NBA, assuming the application doesn’t change from night to night, he can’t have five points in the fourth quarter. The Indiana ecosystem doesn’t work that way. The Pacers are very lucky not to be down 0-2 in the series.
The Oklahoma City ecosystem? It wraps around a man who is consistent for 47 minutes and 55 seconds. Watch the final five seconds, too.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.