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Tyrese Haliburton arrived for a photoshoot in a Las Vegas casino last summer holding onto a pair of silver-tipped cowboy boots and a grudge.
Before the Indiana Pacers guard slipped into a denim outfit and in front of a magazine’s camera, he rattled off all he was grateful for: consecutive appearances at the league’s All-Star game, a contract that would pay him an average of about $52 million annually, and an invitation to play for the United States in the Paris Olympics.
Yet what Haliburton seemed especially thankful for was something else entirely — a perceived criticism that “everybody thinks my success in the first half of last season was a fluke,” he said.
For a player who had gone from effectively being cut from his teenaged travel squad to an NBA All-Star in less than a decade while fueled by collecting slights, it might as well have been like being handed a gift.
“I’m at my best,” Haliburton told me then, “when people are talking s— about me.”
One year later, the NBA is learning that still holds true.
Since being named the NBA’s “most overrated” player in April by an anonymous vote of his peers, as polled by The Athletic, Haliburton has authored a revenge tour that has landed Indiana in the Eastern Conference Finals for a second consecutive season. The Pacers are now four wins away from their first appearance in the NBA Finals in 25 years.
As Haliburton was making all five 3-pointers he attempted in the second quarter of Tuesday’s Game 5 against Cleveland — en route to 31 points in the series-clinching victory that knocked out the Eastern Conference’s top seed — none less than LeBron James referenced, and refuted, the overrated label.
Haliburton has appeared to relish getting the last laugh. After hearing chants of “overrated” in Milwaukee during a first-round series Haliburton, who grew up in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, won the series by driving past Giannis Antetokounmpo, one of the NBA’s toughest defenders, for a basket with a second remaining in overtime. He celebrated with a post on X for emphasis.
Of the 90 players who voted for most overrated in The Athletic’s poll, 14.4 percent chose Haliburton, or about 13 players overall in a league of 450. It could have followed Haliburton’s markedly slow start to the season as he struggled to play through injury. Still, the poll followed expletive-laden criticism on a podcast from Hall of Fame point guard Tim Hardaway Sr., who said Haliburton “thinks he’s all that.”
The sentiments from players both active and retired, though pointed, were hardly universal. But they were all Haliburton needed, said Bryan Johnikin, who coached Haliburton as a teenager on a Milwaukee-based AAU team and remains close to the guard. He has watched Haliburton’s heroics help Indiana beat Milwaukee, then take down Cleveland, with little surprise.
“I’m not, personally, because as soon as I know they called him overrated or said he don’t belong, it really motivates him,” Johnikin said.
Johnikin met the guard when Haliburton was 14 years old and wounded after learning his former AAU team wasn’t keen on him to return.
It was Johnikin’s role as Haliburton’s new coach, he said, to understand what motivated the point guard. Being passed over for Wisconsin’s “Mr. Basketball” honor, awarded to the state’s top high schooler, did the trick. So did arriving for college at Iowa State as a relatively low-level recruit and leaving it as a much-debated draft prospect in part because of the low release of his jump shot.
What those evaluations perhaps missed was Haliburton’s ability to think his way through a problem, Johnikin said. Knowing pace of play typically drops from the regular season to the playoffs, Indiana has done the opposite, running at the postseason’s third-fastest pace.
“I guarantee you, if you put everybody that’s in the playoffs, put them in the classroom, he’s gonna be the smartest guy,” Johnikin said.
Haliburton has averaged 17.5 points, 9.3 assists and 5.5 rebounds in the playoffs, where the Pacers are 17 points better per 100 possessions with Haliburton on the court versus when he sits; no Indiana teammate has a higher on/off rating.
“Hali, that boy he making a lot of people look crazy with that ‘overrated’ s—,” former NBA player Dorell Wright said on a podcast with Dwyane Wade this week. “We need a recount.”
“His game don’t look like you expect it to, right?” Wade said. “He’s got an unorthodox form … he ain’t going to be top 10 in the league in scoring, but he’s still going to dominate the game.”
Among NBA superstars Haliburton, who runs a YouTube channel in which he plays video games against his brother and prefers mid-sized Indianapolis to the league’s shinier, big-city markets, has a notably placid personality. Yet as a devoted fan since childhood of professional wrestling and its theatrics, he is also quick to embrace the villainous role of the “heel.”
In addition to his breakout NBA season, and earning an Olympic gold medal in 2024, one of Haliburton’s personal highlights last year was being written into a skit during WWE Smackdown, in which he and New York Knicks guard Jalen Brunson stared one another down. (In real life, the two are friends.)
These playoffs have felt like a long, extended stare-down with the rest of the league. Haliburton followed his series-winning comeback against Milwaukee by stunning Cleveland with a game-winning 3-pointer to cap another improbable comeback in Game 2. Research by ESPN found that since 1998, teams were 3-1,640 when trailing by seven or more points in the final minute of the fourth quarter or overtime. In this postseason alone, Indiana accounts for two of those three wins.
“I think there is always commentary behind what I do, positive or negative, and I mean it’s hilarious because a lot of times it’s people who know nothing about me have so much to say,” Haliburton said after a second-round victory. “It’s usually people who don’t come around or don’t spend any time around me that have the most to say, but that’s all part of it. I’m a basketball player, I love what I do.
“… I feel like criticism is sometimes warranted, sometimes it’s not but it’s all a part of it.”
Last year, during warmups before Game 7 of a second-round series against New York in Madison Square Garden, Haliburton noticed a specific fan he heard making critical comments and became determined to make him a one-fan motivational tool, turning to glare at the fan after every basket. The Pacers won, and it reinforced to Johnikin a strategy that could be worth every postseason penny in the Eastern Conference Finals — where they could face the Knicks or Boston Celtics — and possibly the NBA Finals.
Indiana should “just pay people to sit in the front row and just talk crazy to Ty, because that’s when he gets going,” Johnikin said. “I’m not worried about him when he goes to New York. Spike Lee and the rest of them talking crazy, he loves that. I call it the ‘it factor.’
“If you talk crazy to Tyrese he’s gonna go, for sure.”
