TYRESE HALIBURTON IS THE FACE — AND THE KILLER — IN CASE ANYONE ASKS AGAIN
He won in Oklahoma City with 0.3 seconds left after winning with a chokehold in New York, giving sports the precious image of a clutch performer while allowing Indiana Pacers fans a chance to dream
He did not say Tyrese Haliburton. It would have been a delightful way to answer a question about the NBA’s most prominent new face, if Rick Carlisle wanted to prove a point. One day before Game 1, he refused to mention his gunner, the man who takes buzzer-beaters and makes them. Maybe he thought the issue was, well, overrated.
“Time will tell,” the Indiana Pacers coach said. “But LeBron James and Steph Curry, those guys are still the gold standard, really. They’re still it, and those guys have been absolutely beyond belief.”
Actually, James was on vacation with his kids, while Curry was talking about owning a team someday. But wherever they were, the legends began to realize Thursday night that within the league’s facial endearment, no one is bigger than Haliburton — the killer who buried the Oklahoma City Thunder with 0.3 seconds remaining after shocking the Knicks and wrapping his hands around his neck in New York. Down 15 points with less than 10 minutes left, the Pacers again returned to win a postseason game they should have lost, as they did three previous times. Each time, Haliburton hit a clutch shot with less than five seconds left.
He’s the one who is beyond belief. The last player to bang a Finals winner so late? Michael Jordan, Game 1, 1997. Sorry to James and Curry, but welcome to the world of Haliburton, who is destined to make America love him even when it once ridiculed him. He lost his mind when online creeps bullied him as a U.S. Olympic team benchwarmer last year, but suddenly, he has reached a historic sequence where he nails all-timers. No timeout was called when the ball found him 21 feet from the basket. Carlisle wanted him to take the shot, knowing he would make it.
Up in the stands of a road arena, his father, John, behaved weeks after chewing out Giannis Antetokounmpo. This story is becoming an American classic in the precious prairies of Indiana, where Caitlin Clark is Haliburton’s close friend. Somehow, the Pacers won 111-110 despite turning the ball over 25 times.
“The coach trusts me in those moments. God trusts me,” Haliburton said. “We had to figure things out. We just kept believing. We stayed together. The game ain’t over until it’s over.
“Man, basketball’s fun. Winning is fun.”
Week after week, he continues to embarrass players who called him the league’s most overrated player in The Athletic. Guess who missed the shot before Haliburton’s winner? Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who was supposed to be The Face of the series. Maybe he’ll still win honors, but those who expected terrible TV ratings might buckle up for a seven-game hoot.
“I think that’s part of my drive,” Haliburton said. “Obviously, I want to be the best. I want to be great. I want to squeeze every ounce of God-given ability that I have to be the best player I can be. But any doubt is always good for me. I think the greats try to find external motivation as much as they can, and that’s something that’s always worked for me. It doesn’t solidify who I am. I know who I am. I don’t need anybody to tell me who I am or who I am as a player or a person. I’m grounded in myself, and I think a lot of that is through the Lord and knowing who I am. But extra doubt, extra fuel, always helps.”
It’s time to praise the Pacers for perseverance. Haliburton only had 14 points and was outscored by Pascal Siakam, Obi Toppin and Myles Turner. He could have passed the ball after feeling earlier jitters. No chance. “We've had to win so many different ways all year. During the regular season. During the playoffs,” he said. “So why would that change during the Finals? We just keep staying at it. And that's the result we get. You guys keep asking us, and we keep giving you the same answer. We're a resilient group and we don't give up till the clock hits zero. We do a great job of just staying in the moment. Try to get from 15 to 10 (down), 10 to 5, 5 to 0. We just walk teams down."
Walk them down. For the longest time, there was more than one face on the court. There were five faces, and Gilgeous-Alexander was one of them. Watching the Thunder steal the ball, block it, loot it, filch it, shoplift it while burying the Pacers with 19 first-half turnovers — the most ever in two quarters of a Finals game — you sensed a new science. Gilgeous-Alexander scored 38 points with his all-encompassing MVP duties. But the Thunder also are about Alex Caruso and Lu Dort and Chet Holmgren and a band of defensive tormenters. “It’s endless,” Caruso said. “An endless wave.”
Yet the support suffered late, when the Pacers finally made shots. Before the game, why were so many basketball insiders raving about Thunder boss Sam Presti as a god? Why did coach Mark Daigneault, at 40, sound like the luckiest kid on the block. “If you replayed my life 10 million times — I used to say a million, but now that we’re playing in the NBA Finals, I’ll say 10 million — this would only happen once,” he said. “And so, there’s never a minute that I’m not grateful.”
He found one at the wrong time. “Great spirit,” he said of the Pacers. “They keep coming. They keep playing. They made plays. They made shots. So, they deserve to win by a point. We’ve got to learn from it. They’ve had so many games like that that have seemed improbable. There's obviously a lot of things we can clean up, but credit them. They went and got that game.”
Said Gilgeous-Alexander, who missed his game-winner: “The series isn’t first to one, it’s first to four. We have four more games to get, they have three. That’s just where we are. We got to understand that and we got to get to four before they get to three, if we want to win the NBA championship. It’s that simple. It’s not rocket science. We lost Game 1. We have to be better.”
Carlisle won a championship in 2011 with Dallas. He must wonder if anything is possible. “Just had to hang in. First half was rough. Nineteen turnovers. The good thing was it was only nine points (at the end of the third quarter),” he said. “So we were within reach. We’ve had a lot of experience in these kinds of games, and our guys have a real good feel for what it’s all about, giving ourselves a chance, and we got fortunate but made plays.”
We are left to wonder what’s next. How many more shots? How many more makes? “When I got off the bus, when I put on my shoes, I mean, there was never a disbelief as a group, honestly,” Haliburton said. “They have a lot of confidence in me to make that shot. I don’t know what you say about it, I just know that this group is a resilient group and we don’t give up until there is zero on the clock.”
Ask Carlisle again. The face is obvious. Louder than the final horn, 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.