Pacers’ Tyrese Haliburton heard the haters, and now he and Indiana are clapping back

The trolls finally got one, but not for long.

NBA social media has become a cesspool of negativity, where fans come together to commiserate about why this player is overrated and that team is garbage. Today’s athletes are so inundated with criticism from the anonymous morass that most of them have learned to push it away.

Even when it affects them, they rarely admit it publicly. Bullies only get their power from the acknowledgment. But everybody has their moments.

For the first month of this season, as his Indiana Pacers were losing and he was playing his worst basketball in years, that was Tyrese Haliburton. To the outside world, it looked like his dominant form from 2023 may have been a mirage. Internally, Haliburton started to wonder if they were right.

“I got too caught up in outside noise and allowing myself to think such negative thoughts about myself internally,” Haliburton shared with The Athletic recently. “It was the first time in my life that I had real self-doubt behind everything I was doing. … I feel like my personal struggles were leading to the team’s struggles.

“A lot of our games early, that we were right there to win, I just wasn’t playing my best basketball and I think that was taking away from us winning games.”

Last season, the Pacers marched on to the Eastern Conference finals, even if Haliburton’s form fell off after a midseason hamstring injury. They entered this campaign with hopes of taking the next step, but things went south early on as their star player still looked like a shell of himself.

When Haliburton was in a funk in the past, he would pull out his phone and seek the trolls trashing him. He often would do it during halftime, looking for fuel to power the Pacers’ redlining offense. Proving haters wrong was the cathartic release he needed to get in touch with himself and his game.

The problem was — from the moment this season started — he knew better than anyone that he couldn’t clap back. He went scoreless in the second game of the season, a blowout loss to the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden, and knew something wasn’t right.

Haliburton was telling confidants that he was playing poorly, reading his mentions and actually agreeing for a change. That’s when his skills trainer Drew Hanlen could see the pressure was getting to the 24-year-old.

“This year, for whatever reason, it was just hurting him,” Hanlen said.

The more he struggled, the more he receded into old habits. Haliburton lost his aggression to attack the paint, unable to beat defenders with a first step off of that recovering hamstring.

He looked tentative, trying to sit back as a distributor and losing some of the edge that made him a two-time All-Star. The problem was twofold, starting with his health.

“He rushed back early last year to make the All-NBA 65-game rule and he was never fully healthy,” Hanlen said. “Then at the Olympics, he re-aggravated it. So after the Olympics, he couldn’t work out and had to let it heal. So he worked out zero times the entire summer.”

The breaking point came in Charlotte on Nov. 8, a 20-point loss that sent the team spiraling below .500. He once again missed every 3, couldn’t get to the line and fully accepted he was the problem.

“It was so bad,” Haliburton said. “That was the first time I was so frustrated with myself, so frustrated with the group. But it was more about myself. How can I be better?”

It started with cutting out the distractions and sources of anxiety. He deleted X from his phone in an attempt to go cold turkey on immersive doomscrolling. He started going back to church, recognizing he was getting caught up within himself and wanting to look at the positives in life.

“That’s been good for me to read my Bible more. It’s been good for me,” he said. “My relationship with the Lord has been really big for me internally, to be the best version of myself and just trying to pour energy into our group and that’s been helping us.

“After that, things have clicked and changed for me. I feel light years better.”

Haliburton was not the same player entering the season, but the Pacers changed as well. Andrew Nembhard showed in the postseason he could be the two-way guard the team needed, while Bennedict Mathurin’s return from a torn labrum added another scorer to the mix.

This roster did not call for Haliburton to dominate the ball like he did in the past, especially with his quickness in the half court diminished. To figure out his future with the Pacers, he had to tap into his past.

When he was drafted by the Sacramento Kings in 2020, he had to squeeze his distinct skill set into a crowded backcourt. De’Aaron Fox was the star point guard and Buddy Hield was the shooting guard, two traditional representations of the positions. Where did a fluid playmaker fit into the dynamic?

Hield taught him how to move in space to make himself open, even when the opposing coach wrote on the locker room whiteboard with a cascade of underlines to not let that happen. Though Haliburton said he initially couldn’t stand the way Hield played, they eventually found a synergy playing off each other. When the two friends were traded to the Pacers together, coach Rick Carlisle put the ball in Haliburton’s hands full time and they started running the two-man actions they were developing in Sacramento.

While the focus on Haliburton’s struggles in early 2024 focused on his hamstring injury, it coincided with Hield being traded to Philadelphia. But Nembhard’s emergence allowed Haliburton to operate as more of a two-guard, putting into practice the lessons he learned from Hield.

“Since Buddy’s been gone, I’ve learned to play off the ball a little bit more,” Haliburton said. “It’s been part of the growth figuring out how I can stay involved while off the ball, how I can use my gravity as a shooter. I just try to use my gravity to impact the game in other ways. I think that’s what I learned from Buddy, playing aside him for so long.”

Haliburton is not the typical point guard who can beat anyone off the bounce. He has a high dribble, is not overtly physical and doesn’t have a bag of go-to shots like most All-Star playmakers. He is someone who thrives in chaos, getting where he wants when he is up in transition or attacking against the grain of the defense.

Nembhard running point allows Haliburton to leak out in transition earlier, so he can then run around screens to catch the ball on the move. It also allows Haliburton to set up a cross-match early in a possession, like when he got Miami’s Haywood Highsmith off him before the play began so he could attack Tyler Herro in space.

Now Haliburton is finally starting to get downhill more consistently from give-and-go actions with Myles Turner by refining that combo guard role he first learned in Sacramento. In recent weeks, Turner and Haliburton have looked more in sync, as evidenced by Turner knowing where Haliburton was cutting even when getting the ball at an awkward spot on the floor.

“I think that Ty is finally starting to realize that he can get guys so much more open than just passing the ball,” Turner told The Athletic. “He talks to me, like, ‘Yo, go right here and do this and do this, and do that.’ And then lo and behold, I get the ball. So I think he’s starting to analyze the game a lot more, and then he picks and chooses his spots to start scoring.”

The true turning point came at the end of 2024. Haliburton had his worst performance since the first week of the season when they blew a fourth-quarter lead in Oklahoma City on Dec. 26 and then looked passive the next night in a blowout loss to the Boston Celtics.

But they stuck around Boston and he looked more aggressive than ever in a rematch two nights later, scoring 10 of his 11 baskets inside the arc to take the Celtics out in crunchtime. Sprinting over Turner screens while Nembhard handled the ball, getting to the rim suddenly seemed easy.

Haliburton recorded 33 points and 15 assists with six 3s and no turnovers at Miami last week. The only other time that has happened in NBA history was on Nov. 14, 2023 — by Tyrese Haliburton.

With Nembhard back in the lineup, Haliburton finally looks free.

“Their importance to each other is evident,” Carlisle said. “They complement each other well. Andrew allows Ty to play off the ball and when Ty has the ball, Drew knows the game and knows how to play without the ball too.”

Indiana fell into a hole when Nembhard missed 12 straight games in November due to left knee tendinitis, but the Pacers have flipped their season around since his return in early December. He is the spirit of their defense and the glue to their offense. Multiple players on the team called him their X-factor to winning.

They enter Friday’s game versus Golden State at 10-3 since Dec. 13, ranking fourth in the league in net rating at plus-8.7 over that stretch, per Cleaning the Glass. Indiana (20-18) has gone from 11th to sixth place in the Eastern Conference entering Friday, and Haliburton is finally starting to look like the All-Star he was a season ago.

He’s averaging 20.4 points and 9.6 assists per game while shooting 40.2 percent from 3 during this time. Of the 25 lineups with at least 300 possessions played this season, the Pacers’ starting group with Nembhard has the league’s best defensive rating, per Cleaning the Glass.

They are finally coming together now that Haliburton has the backcourt partner he needs to free up his game, looking like an evolution of the team that nearly beat the Celtics four times in the conference finals but never sneaked away with a win.

As Carlisle made clear recently during a West Coast trip in late December, the Pacers welcome all those expectations that were earned from last season’s run.

“We’re trying to win a championship,” he reminded a room full of reporters.

His presence alone is proof positive of their mission, as the coach who won it all with Dallas in 2011 came to Indiana a decade later with the expressed intent of turning this team into a legitimate title contender.

Their group moved closer toward that goal with the Pascal Siakam trade last season, landing the two-time All-Star forward who signed a four-year, $189.5 million extension in the summer. And when the Pacers stumbled early — due to a rash of injuries to nearly half of Indiana’s rotation — Carlisle wasn’t about to let any of the outside skepticism seep into his program. So he kept pushing.

“There’s nothing wrong with high expectations,” said the 65-year-old Carlisle, who is 11th all-time in wins among coaches. “What you don’t want is a situation of apathy, where expectations are low and all you’re ever doing is selling hope. That’s not why I came here, that’s not why (Pacers president of basketball operations) Kevin Pritchard is doing his job and that’s not what our ownership is about.”

Health remains an issue. Small forward Aaron Nesmith (left ankle) has been out since Nov. 1. There was the Nembhard injury. Second-year guard Ben Sheppard missed a month with an oblique and rib injury. Big men Isaiah Jackson and James Wiseman, who were slated to support Turner down low as key reserves, both suffered torn Achilles’ tendons within days of one another at the start of the season. The Pacers had to hit the transaction market earlier than expected to bring in Thomas Bryant as the new backup big.

The Pacers are over .500 now, but their identity is solidifying as the team gets closer to full health. The championship aspirations that seemed farfetched a few weeks ago are at least reasonable once again.

“It’s just not being satisfied. That was the message in training camp,” Turner said. “Obviously, we had a hell of a run last year, but let’s stop talking about last year. That’s over and done with. And yeah, we’re pushing toward a (NBA) Finals run. That’s really where all of our eyes should be in this locker room.”

The fans still flooding Haliburton’s mentions will probably laugh at that notion. He is still searching for consistency and will have to push through his latest mild ankle sprain to ensure he doesn’t fall back into old habits again. But he won’t have to face that music now unless he wants to.

“(Fans) can’t wait for a team to be doing bad so people can dunk on you on Twitter, you know what I mean? The s— is so stupid,” Haliburton said. “It’s just part of it. People want to see us not do well so they can talk s—.”

Now that Haliburton is in a better place, maybe he can crack his phone open, see a bunch of trash emojis and crack a smile. They can talk all they want, but he’s ready to clap back on his terms, one drive at a time.

(Top photo of Haliburton: Catalina Fragoso / NBAE via Getty Images)