Tyrese Haliburton had a bad start to this season, and so did his team. During Thanksgiving weekend, the Indiana Pacers were just 6-10, and their star point guard was putting up dismal numbers: 38 percent shooting from the field, with just a 29 percent average from beyond the three-point arc. His tough beginning to the 24-25 season was too much to overcome, statistically—a year after being a centerpiece for the All-Star game as it was hosted in his team’s city, Haliburton was left off the 2025 squad.
His team has turned around, though, and if you’re reading this, you probably know they’re off to a 1-0 lead in their second round playoff series against the 64-win Cleveland Cavaliers. Haliburton, in the past few months, has played much better, but also proved that his personal productivity is not necessarily paramount to the Pacers’ success. What’s essential is that he be their master of uptempo disaster, throttling NBA games into warp-speed physics experiments with his long, accurate passes, flicks of the wrist that push strategy forward faster than any defensive bodies can keep up with.
At this, Haliburton leads by example. Other Pacers guards are not quite interchangeable—only Haliburton has a ridiculous assist-to-turnover ratio of nearly 6-to-1, as a high-volume ball-flinger—but they all behave ably within the Haliburton passing system, contributing collectively to Indiana’s entropic offense. (This consistent ball-pusing gives the Pacers a perhaps historic claim to the nature of their team’s moniker.) In the NBA, there is a term often used to denigrate those who succeed only within the specific context of their team’s matrix: System Player. Haliburton gives the term a different meaning. He is a System Player in that the system flows from him. It is his vision of basketball that defines how his team plays.
In other words, Cleveland has a lot to adjust to. Especially because the Pacers have figured out how to create resistance on defense, too. A bottom-ten unit last season, they have fought their way to about league average. The acquisition of Pascal Siakam, who Indiana traded for in the middle of 23-24, has been key on this front. Long, quick, and forged in the fires of his championship run with the 18-19 Toronto Raptors, Siakam creates discomfort on both sides of the ball. He’s also their most important scorer; while Haliburton, Andrew Nembhard, Aaron Nesmith, and even Benedict Mathurin can all make hay from the perimeter in Indiana’s equal-opportunity machine, it’s Siakam’s consistent slashing and mismatch-abuse that they invariably need to exploit advantages.
Really, though, it comes from everywhere with the Pacers. What’s more important than who has the ball is where it is in its sequence. They only play guys who can score, and all of them wait their turn—which is always only seconds away—for the green light. This balanced attack was visible in their Game 1 conquest in Cleveland, with Pacers starters notching 17, 17, 13, 23, and 22 points each. Maybe scarier, for Cleveland, is that a lot of Indiana’s offense didn’t come from their usually quick system, but from stand-still, high-courage shotmaking; three-pointers made right in their eyes, by guards without fear.
The Cavs’ own moxie man was Sixth Man of The Year finalist Ty Jerome, who continued to make a professional hoop look like a plastic Nerf thing in a basement with his 21 sandbox points. If Cleveland cannot field their All-Star guard Darius Garland in the series—he missed the first game with a toe injury—then they will continue to need such bravery from Jerome. They leant on him almost as much as they did on Donovan Mitchell, in the 121-112 loss; the two took a combined 50 shots, just a bit more than half of the team’s total attempts.
Like the Pacers, the Cavaliers are both a group of exceptional men and a team with missions and principles for every game, ideas that go beyond individuals. They haven’t played a serious game in at least a month, mowing down the hapless Miami Heat in their first-round series, after coasting to home-court advantage in the Eastern Conference with time to spare in the regular season. It’s possible that, a week from now, the Cavaliers have re-asserted themselves as extra-elite problem solvers, and their issues with the Pacers look like yesterday’s weather. But whether or not they remain an issue for Cleveland, it’s clear that Indiana will be running other teams off the floor for many more years to come.