“With Tyrese Haliburton, All Things Are Possible”

When Tyrese Haliburton arrived in Indianapolis in February 2022, he joined a veteran team plodding its way through a losing streak. It had been a particularly bleak season for the Pacers—one of the worst in franchise history by wins and losses, spoiled somewhat by injury but more so by joylessness. The core of a team will usually tell you when its time is through, and that version of the Pacers spoke through its gear-grinding futility, as possession after possession seemed to go nowhere at all. The front office listened, and with the trade deadline approaching, sent Domantas Sabonis, the only All-Star on the roster, to Sacramento as part of a six-player deal to land Haliburton.

It took all of two practices for Haliburton to completely change the way the Pacers played basketball. Outlet passes fired off faster. Threes went up earlier. The ball flew around the court—whether from Haliburton slinging dimes to refreshingly open shooters, or a hodgepodge of role players suddenly taking after him. “I feel like when I got here, it was kind of about finding our offensive DNA,” Haliburton says. In a way, it had already been found. Haliburton took off running, and the remaining Pacers discovered what so many of the point guard’s teammates have: He plays in a way that makes you want to follow him.

Myles Turner, who had been out for weeks with a foot injury, had to stop himself from sprinting back out onto the court once he saw how easy Haliburton made the game for everyone else. “We were playing at the time with some of our G League centers and some guys trying to earn minutes and stuff like that,” Turner says. “And they were finishing with 20 and 10.” The makeshift Pacers sometimes veered into each other’s lanes out on the break, but it didn’t really matter; Haliburton’s passes cut right through the traffic.

Even the production crew for the Pacers’ local broadcast had to figure out how to keep up. There was no time anymore for “hero shots” of an opposing scorer after a made basket; Haliburton was grabbing the ball out of the referee’s hands to fire passes upcourt, and his teammates were launching shots faster than the broadcast could cut back to the action. So many Pacers were sprinting up the floor and off the screen that the camera operators had to change the way they framed the break—starting wider and then easing in closer, as if they were shooting the start of a down at the Colts’ Lucas Oil Stadium.

For Haliburton, it was just the way he had always played. His father, John, had raised him on a steady diet of Magic Johnson highlights, marveling about the speed, the connection, the power of the pass. When Tyrese was old enough to go to his first basketball camps, Frank Schade, a legendary coach in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, sent him off to the races in the same full-court drills he’s run local kids through for decades. It had never really occurred to Haliburton to slow down. He was taught that the game is an open floor, and he learned to read it with the help of a PlayStation.

“Honestly, a lot of my hoop knowledge in knowing how to play comes from video games,” he says. “When you’re playing 2K and you’re on that camera angle where you can see everything ahead of you, that’s how I think sometimes.”

The more Indiana trusted in that vision, the more became possible. The immediate takeoff was a revelation, and proof of concept for what Pacers management hoped their roster could be. “The initial team that we had that year, we were last in the league in dunks,” Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle says. “I don’t know where we were in pace, but it had to be the lower half of the league. And then Tyrese walked in the door. It was just a burst of change.”

And it was only the beginning. The Pacers have played faster and faster with Haliburton at the wheel, and their offense has only grown more explosive. So far this season, Indiana is scoring a league-leading 122 points per 100 possessions—a small sampling that, if it holds, would register as the most productive offense in NBA history. Firepower like that can turn style into substance, and has given the Pacers—who are tied for the third-best record in the East—an inside track to the team’s first playoff berth since 2020.

Most players in the NBA are brought in to fill a role, and some to address a team’s specific weakness. The Pacers brought in Haliburton to change everything. The style. The culture. The future. “We had a very businesslike group before,” general manager Chad Buchanan says. “There wasn’t a lot of personality. They came in, they worked, but there wasn’t a lot of spark.”

That’s where the 23-year-old point guard with the megawatt smile comes in, eager to turn every teammate who runs with him into a living, breathing highlight. Indiana has never had a player like Haliburton, which is why Pacers management targeted him in the first place—and a big reason why this summer they signed him to a five-year max extension worth as much as $260 million. Veteran players and their agents around the league have already started viewing Indiana as a different kind of destination: a place where you go to have a career year, and have a ball while you’re doing it.

“I play a style of basketball that people want to play,” Haliburton says. “I think that’s part of the reason why they signed me to the deal they signed me to. I’ve got long-term stability here because they know that I can help bring people here—not only with who I am as a basketball player, but who I am as a person.”

That’s the 260-million-dollar idea. Haliburton is intended to be the start of something: a star hand-picked to bring in other stars. An outlet pass just waiting for its breakaway finisher. The small-market Pacers have churned out solid team after solid team over the years, but struggled to attract the kind of elite talent that could take them even further. So a team in the heart of the Midwest decided to bank its future on something else: the notion that some forces in the basketball world are impossible to deny. Now, Indiana will see whether Haliburton is one of them.

Photo by Tim Heitman/Getty Images

Buddy Hield was baffled. Sacramento had used the 12th pick in the 2020 draft to select another guard for a roster that already had too many, and the one they chose didn’t really look the part of a lottery pick. When Hield saw Haliburton getting shots up beneath the giant windows at the far end of the Kings’ practice facility, he saw the same thing many scouts had: a skinny kid who didn’t seem particularly athletic, launching up 3s with a bizarre release.

“I was like: They drafted this guy?” Hield remembers.

Yet as those same scouts will attest: Haliburton grows on you. You might miss what makes him special if you reduce his game to a package of clips, and you definitely won’t see it when he shoots alone in an otherwise empty gym. It might not even come through in practice, where Haliburton is “awful” by his own admission. But if you watch him in the full, organic context of a game, you start to notice all the ways he shapes the action. You feel the accumulation of smart play after smart play after smart play. Watch enough of those games, and his stardom becomes not only clear, but obvious. Even though Haliburton fell to the 12th pick, he had true believers in virtually every draft room around the league. Carlisle—then the head coach of the Mavericks—was one of them.

“We tried desperately to move up to get him,” says Carlisle, whose team held the 18th pick. “Our analytics people thought that he was the best player in the draft, and we just couldn’t manage to do it.” (Mavericks governor Mark Cuban echoed as much on a podcast with intrepid reporter Patrick Beverley.) So Haliburton went to Sacramento, and once he started playing, he made a true believer out of Hield, too. “I started to see his charisma,” Hield says. “I started to see why everybody loved him so much: He would actually pass the ball and make everybody better. That’s a guy I want to play with.”

One of the virtues of Haliburton’s game is that he genuinely wants to throw the ball ahead, to empower his teammates as creators. One of the virtues of Hield’s game is that he wants, maybe more than anything in the world, to get buckets—and he’s not about to let his conscience get in the way of an open look just because it’s a little early in the shot clock. The two were a perfect match. Haliburton and Hield found their rhythm quickly in Sacramento, and when they were traded together to Indiana, their on-court collaboration—fast, reactive, and free-flowing—basically set the template for the entire Pacers offense. Indiana made more transition 3s than any team in the league last season in part because Hield made more transition 3s than any other player. And Hield was in position to do so primarily because his point guard was looking for every opportunity to give the ball up early.

“That’s something that Tyrese realizes and a lot of guys don’t,” Carlisle says. “They like having the ball and like controlling things. But he sees the connection with lightning-fast ball movement, teammate engagement, and the positive impact of getting the ball back live.”

Basketball, after all, isn’t a game of inches. It’s 94 feet of freedom, and any point guard walking the ball up is surrendering half their permit. For Haliburton, the push begins before he even has the ball. “Before I get the outlet pass,” he says, “I always glance forward.” It takes only a fraction of a second for him to map out the court and everyone on it—to see who’s running and, most crucially, who’s not. Opponents are almost always behind the curve because Indiana practices pace. On the days between games, they drill a continuous five-man weave—sprinting and passing up the floor over and over and over, aiming to get the ball across half-court within three seconds. “It’s hard, man,” Turner says. “As fast as we play, we practice 10 times faster.” Other teams, of course, know what the Pacers are after. But it’s one thing to read about fast breaks in a scouting report, and another to feel your entire margin for error dissolve. To realize that if you so much as drive to the basket or crash the offensive glass, you might as well be watching from the stands as the Pacers streak to the other end.

Obi Toppin, leak-out artist extraordinaire, has predictably become one of Haliburton’s favorite targets. The former Knick had been eyeing the Pacers for more than a year, and strategizing with his agent about how he might be able to get to Indiana. A trade granted his wish. It was a perfect opportunity for the Pacers to supercharge their frontcourt with one of the league’s most sensational open-floor talents. “It’d be hard for me to imagine that you couldn’t take a guy like Obi Toppin and turn him into a world-class track athlete,” Carlisle says. “Or triple jump? Can you even imagine?” Lately, he’s been auditioning for the 100-meter:

When there’s a pass to be made over the top, Haliburton sends it. When there’s not, he shoots the ball up the sideline instead, giving runners like Hield, Bennedict Mathurin, and Bruce Brown license to see what they can find for themselves. “You’ve gotta put good energy in the ball,” Haliburton says. “Put good energy into the game, and the basketball gods will reward you. I feel like most times, if I kick ahead and give my teammate a chance to get downhill, it’ll come back to me.” And when it does, the offense is almost always better for it, with momentum to ride or a mismatch to work. Carlisle and his staff call this pace after—when a fast break bleeds straight into Indiana’s offense. If you don’t stop attacking, the break never really ends.

An initial drive-and-kick feeds into another drive, which reroutes into a dribble handoff, which leads into a pick-and-roll. “It’s harder to guard when the other team doesn’t know what’s about to happen,” Carlisle says. “It’s also harder to guard when your guys don’t know what’s about to happen, either.” In a random, reactive offense like Indiana’s, there are no decoys. There’s no misdirection. Every player is a live threat. “It’s always a different option every time,” Hield says. “It’s very rare that I get back-to-back 3-pointers, or rare that Tyrese gets back-to-back layups. You’re picking your poison, and we’re playing out of that.”

Indiana was a transition terror last season but stalled out in the half-court as its schedule wore on. Switching defenses threw off the continuity. Injuries and shooting slumps made it difficult to sustain momentum. Some teams even started going under screens for Haliburton and denying his teammates, picking their poison by daring the pass-first point guard to beat them as a scorer. Even when Haliburton rose to the occasion, you could sense a reluctance in his pull-up jumpers.

“The biggest challenge for me is finding that balance,” Haliburton says. “There’s probably a world out there where I could realistically average 15 assists. There’s a world out there where I could average 25 points. Well, I’m trying to find a mixture of doing both.”

The ongoing tension between when to score and when to pass is something Haliburton talks about with Pacers assistant Jenny Boucek, who saw Sue Bird walk the same line when she coached the WNBA’s Seattle Storm. It’s something Haliburton goes over on film with his trainer, Drew Hanlen, who makes it a point to call out every single moment in which he could have attempted a shot. “He yells at me every game,” Haliburton says. And that’s what he wants: to be pushed. Haliburton knows that his trajectory as a player ultimately depends on his ability to shift into scoring mode. That’s what moves a defense, though sometimes it requires a committed passer to stomach the sort of quick, aggressive shots that make him a bit queasy.

The Haliburton of last season wouldn’t have dropped 25 points in a single quarter like he did against Charlotte earlier this month—though in being true to himself, Haliburton still managed to squeeze six assists into the frame, too. That seems like a pretty healthy balance, if the kind that no one in the NBA’s play-by-play era had ever managed before. The clearest marker of Haliburton’s progress, however, lies in the fact that the Pacers don’t just have the top overall offense in the NBA this season. They have the second-most efficient half-court offense in the league, too.

The best version of the Pacers is drawn by five players making instantaneous decisions, attacking in so many ways so quickly that the defense never has a chance to recover. “When you’re in the mix, you feel like you’re involved,” Toppin says. “It feels like they need you out there offensively and defensively—you’re not just sitting there in the corner, waiting for a shot.” This sort of basketball, even more than regimented systems, relies on trust. When you don’t have a script for how a possession is supposed to develop, you have to believe that every teammate who touches the ball has the best of intentions. That’s why the hit-ahead pass matters. “It’s a small thing,” backup point guard T.J. McConnell says, “but a big thing.” It’s why it means something more when Haliburton points out an open teammate who needs the ball, or swings it without hesitation and yells, “THAT’S CASH!” before a shot even goes up. “That type of stuff is huge for me,” Turner says.

For the first time in almost a decade, there is perfect clarity in how Indiana is going to play. The Pacers run because Haliburton runs. They share the ball because he shares the ball. His tendencies became the team’s house style, and because of that, there is perfect clarity in how Indiana is building its roster, too. “Ty has really kind of set the table for what our approach as a franchise is going forward, from a personnel standpoint,” Carlisle says. The roster has almost completely turned over since Haliburton’s arrival, and the additions the Pacers made this summer—namely Brown, Toppin, and rookie Jarace Walker—are all born to run.

“It’s easy to spot guys that I think can succeed with Ty,” Buchanan says. It’s a little more difficult, however, to find players who can keep pace with Haliburton while defending and rebounding at the level Indiana needs. Playing fast and defending hard often come from very different player profiles—with a few exceptions. “Bruce does both,” Buchanan says. “And we’re trying to get Obi there.” Toppin is almost a defensive project—an explosive, kinetic player who hasn’t dominated the glass or played air-tight defense consistently, but could. He’s exactly the sort of talent the Pacers have come to understand in a different way.

Over the past few years, Indiana’s front office has reconsidered the way it looks at—and values—athleticism. “We knew we had to sort of retune our thoughts,” team president Kevin Pritchard says. The speed of the NBA game had reached a point where some teams were getting left behind. Even those that didn’t play small had to be able to play fast. The Pacers, historically, have rarely been that. Many of the best teams in franchise history operated at a steady trot or, at best, a canter. Indiana pushed the speed limit for a few years in the late 2000s with rosters led by Danny Granger, Troy Murphy, and Mike Dunleavy Jr., which kind of tells you everything you need to know about the organization’s athletic history.

Carlisle noted that his team had ranked last in dunks before trading for Haliburton in 2022, but over the past decade, the Pacers have wound up near the bottom of the league in dunks almost every season. Back in 2019, an otherwise solid Indiana team went an entire regular season without completing a single lob dunk. This time around, with Haliburton running the show and a remade roster ready to keep up, the Pacers are dunking at a rate uncharacteristically above league average. Toppin has barely worn the blue and gold and already popped off what might be the first between-the-legs dunk in franchise history. (Non-Dunk-Contest Division.)

“Something little like that is normal to me,” Toppin says. “But everybody else is telling me that’s crazy. That’s the energy being built up in the arena.” It’s also the pure, psychedelic thrill of a fan base accustomed to a more grounded basketball experience. “Sabonis is an elite big man in the league,” Haliburton says. “But post moves aren’t exciting. You know what I mean? Even [Nikola] Jokic, he’s probably the best player in the world right now. But post moves aren’t that exciting. That’s just how basketball works.” It’s impossible to extricate the buzz around the Pacers contending for the playoffs from the electricity that comes from their style of play.

“Most of the positive and important things that happen in a basketball game happen on the ground,” Carlisle says. “Now, that said: This is a game of speed. Our greatly increased dunk quotient, more than anything, speaks to the level of team speed that we have now. I don’t care if we dunk the ball or not. That’s not important to me. But this game needs to be a fun game. It needs to be fun for the players. When the players are having fun, the fans are having fun. And when the fans are having fun, the arena is full, and the environment is awesome.”

The Pacers were built for this. Haliburton is dishing no-look jump passes. Mathurin is bulldozing his way through traffic and trying to tear down the rim whenever he can. “My coaches always said that I carried myself like I was Dwayne Johnson,” Mathurin notes. “But I really think I am—and I haven’t really been proven otherwise.” Hield, who has been the fastest player in the league on offense this season, is flying around the floor just waiting for a defender to make a mistake. Aaron Nesmith has already caught a few bodies. Springy reserve center Isaiah Jackson—a test case in the Pacers’ new athletic priorities—is one of the exceptional few to swat the living hell out of 7-foot-4 rookie sensation Victor Wembanyama. Toppin is out in front running the break, popping off a perfectly casual between-the-legs dunk in the middle of a competitive game. The speed is the point—and the Pacers are quickly delivering wins and record-setting performances and a new understanding of what Indiana basketball can be.

“Those Pacers teams that I remember,” Haliburton says, ”David West, Roy Hibbert—speaking for the rest of America, it was like: [Paul George] is young and talented and Lance [Stephenson] is fun, but these guys are kinda boring. I tell P that all the time. I didn’t wanna watch the Pacers.” Haliburton wanted to watch the Heat—to see a team that would not only win, but one that would turn a fast break against his hometown Bucks into something unforgettable. “We all wanna get the job done,” he says. “But there’s a mixture of it. I think this style of basketball is exciting for people and makes it more fun for everybody involved.”

Photo by Sarah Stier/Getty Images

At the end of every season, Pritchard and Buchanan sit down with every player on the Pacers roster to talk about the way things went—a standard practice in the NBA world. One question they always ask is:

What more can we do, as management, to help the team?

Some players might have notes about communication or travel policies. Others might have a few quibbles about the team facility. But an exit interview with Haliburton has a way of turning into a think tank. How can we help out the equipment manager? Does the strength coach get paid extra to come work guys out on off days? And why, when the team goes on the road, do we offer meals for players after shootaround but not for the rest of the support staff?

“He just sees the whole picture,” Buchanan says. “He’s not siloed into just him and his best friend on the team or whatever. He sees the whole group and how it impacts the pulse and mood of the team, which is a really unique quality based on my experience in the NBA.” The impact of every star is felt differently. Some of the league’s most incredible players clock in and clock out, and that works for them. Haliburton doesn’t really operate that way. When the Pacers have a team outing, he organizes it and books cars for everyone. If he and some teammates are going out for dinner after a game, there are no cliques. The whole team is invited—and Haliburton is paying.

“Of course, when you get a big-ass contract, it’s all good,” Hield jokes. “But he’s serving us in a way where we can’t repay him back.”

The newest Pacers are still getting used to that dynamic. Before the season, Brown—a country music devotee—was shocked to learn that Haliburton had never visited Nashville, and suggested a trip. Haliburton turned the idea into a full-blown, teamwide mini-camp. The Pacers worked out and scrimmaged during the day and went barhopping at night. Brown, one of only two NBA players to have an endorsement deal with Stetson, wore a cowboy hat—“Every. Single. Night,” Haliburton says. Brown has been traveling with his hat by packing it away in a suitcase, carefully encircled by clothes. But the two-year, $45 million contract he signed with the Pacers this summer allows for a few splurges.

“Now that I’ve gotten paid a little bit,” Brown says, “I’m actually getting a hat box from Boot Barn.”

Haliburton’s teammates rave about how many things like the mini-camp are simply taken care of, right on time and down to the smallest detail. They get FaceTimes from him out of the blue, sometimes to catch up and sometimes just to talk a little shit. Haliburton knows their parents, their siblings, their friends. He never misses a birthday. He planned the Pacers’ Halloween party this year; he went as Miles Morales, and his girlfriend, Jade, went as Gwen Stacy—complete with an Across the Spider-Verse–themed photoshoot. (Brown, ever the cowboy, dressed as Woody.) Haliburton cares about details, but more than anything, he cares about people. You would think that his superpower lies in throwing the kinds of passes that almost no one else in the world can. But then you’ll see a young boy walk up to him, too shy and nervous to even speak, and within a minute that boy is smiling and laughing in an extended debate with Tyrese over the best flavor of Baby Bottle Pop.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re a player, a coach, a ball boy, a GM—he’s gonna treat everyone the same,” says Pacers assistant Isaac Yacob, who has worked with Haliburton since he was a video coordinator with the Kings. When Yacob and Haliburton would sit together on team flights to go over game film together, Tyrese never wanted to watch clips of just his own possessions. He wanted to go through the entire game, piece by piece—to see the full board.

“We’ll watch the whole game,” Yacob says, “and we’ll just talk through: What did you see here? We talk about what other players are doing, right or wrong. What can he do to help them?”

Point guard, the way Haliburton plays it, is a position of empathy. Sometimes the job is about understanding who might be feeling insecure about their contract situation and making them feel valued. Other times, it’s about seeing what a younger teammate has been working on in practice and helping them showcase that skill in a game. Every roster is a balancing act of 15 or so players, each with their own goals, their own incentives, their own anxieties. “My job is to make sure everybody eats,” Haliburton says. “If dudes make sacrifices for me, I’ve gotta be able to give ‘em a bone here and there. If Myles is setting 10 ball screens in a row, I’m gonna get him a touch. If I see Benn hasn’t touched it in a little bit, I’m gonna run a set for him, get him involved.”

Haliburton’s father often reminds him that in this role, he’s responsible for the livelihood of everyone around him. Part of seeing the bigger picture is understanding the costs of people depending on you. What qualifies Haliburton for that kind of responsibility, beyond being one of the premiere point guards in the league, is that he cares enough to know as much as he can. “He knows everything about every guy,” Buchanan says. “Where they’re from, what AAU team they played for, what NBA teams they played for, their contract, who their agent is. He knows all that shit. So he’s already invested. He can put himself in their shoes.”

“Let’s just say Obi, for example,” Haliburton explains. “His contract’s up after the year. And me and Obi are really close—we’ve been close since predraft. We have the same marketing agent—we’re cool. I’m trying to boost his career. I want to help him right now. How can I help him eat?”

Haliburton wants to do for Toppin what he did for Turner, Hield, Nesmith, and others: help him play the best basketball of his life. When Turner saw Haliburton in action for the first time as a Pacer, he saw the opportunity of his career. Finally, a chance to play with a pass-first guy, Turner remembers thinking. The Pacers as we know them are now built around that very draw.

“In a small market, you need a player or players that other guys say, ‘I wanna play with him,’” Buchanan says. “I don’t care where he’s at. ‘That guy, I’d like to play with him.’ We didn’t feel like we had one of those guys at that time.”

By playing style alone, Haliburton is unlike any star the Pacers have ever had. Last season, he became the first player in franchise history to average double-digit assists. The last Pacer to average even eight assists was Jamaal Tinsley, some 15 years ago. But moreover, Turner was right: Not only has the veteran center looked like the best, most realized version of himself playing with Haliburton, but the two of them have made for the most prolific assist combination in the entire league this season.

“Ty is a very capable scorer, but I think he gets off more getting guys involved and pushing that pace,” Turner says. “He’s just a savant with the stuff he does out there.”

The rest of the basketball world has taken notice. Haliburton spent his summer jet-setting around the South Pacific with Team USA, a bright spot in what was ultimately a losing bid for the Americans in the FIBA World Cup. Early in group play, one of New Zealand’s coaches could be heard on the broadcast warning his team that Haliburton was coming into the game. “Haliburton’s in!” the coach yelled. “No passes over the top!” The scouting report had gone international.

But within Team USA, some of the NBA’s best young players took part in the time-honored tradition of recruiting each other. USA Basketball has been the launchpad for more than a few superteams over the years, or at the very least, to the germ of the idea behind them. You don’t just forget how exhilarating it is to play alongside a talent like Anthony Edwards—or, for that matter, like Haliburton. And so the stars of Team USA tend to alternate between hard-selling each other on what it would be like to team up together in the league, and playfully talking shit about how they’d rather beat one another instead. When I ask Haliburton which players on this year’s team had been the most shameless on the recruiting trail, he thinks for a moment, smiles, and says: “Maybe me.”

This, Haliburton tells me, is part of his job now.

“Obviously, that’s what the NBA is,” he says. “It’s been that forever. So that’s our job as the top guys in the league is to make it appealing to other guys to want to come play with you. Because the more talent you have around you, the more fun it’ll be and the better chance you have of winning.”

This summer was the first time that Brown actually got to choose his NBA home. The veteran guard had been a free agent before, including in 2022—but wound up signing with Denver by default when no other offers materialized. It worked out pretty well for him. This time around, Brown and his agent set a full slate of meetings to enjoy the process and see what a championship pedigree is worth. He had conversations with the Nuggets about the $7.8 million they could offer—the best they could do through his Bird rights—and considered a return. He got some interest from the Knicks and thought about what that might look like. Then he heard from the Pacers and immediately canceled the rest of his meetings. Why would Brown close the door on a process he had been waiting for his whole career?

“Obviously, I mean, shit—getting paid a great bag,” he says. “And then Tyrese.” Haliburton and Brown didn’t really know each other, but the Pacers star called him to make his case. He told Brown about the fit. The speed. All the opportunities he’d have to take the ball and run with it. “When someone calls you and recruits you to a team,” Brown says, “it’s a different feeling.”

Brown is an excellent role player—a winner any team would be lucky to have. But next time around, the Pacers have their sights set even higher. “We can go after some big players in the summer,” Pritchard says. “We can look at some big trades.” This season will tell the Pacers just how big. Indiana plays a lot of undersized lineups that get worked over inside, resulting in one of the most foul-prone defenses in the league. So long as that’s the case, a big, physical forward clearly rates as Indiana’s most pressing need. There’s hope that Walker can eventually fit that bill, but for now the no. 8 draft pick is a bit raw for even rotation minutes. A game-ready, All-Star-level version of that player could vault Indiana into a pretty select class in the East.

Management has been careful not to let this group get ahead of itself. Haliburton, who hasn’t been on a winning team since his freshman year at Iowa State, is desperate to make the playoffs. First, the Pacers have to earn the right—by running straight through their hot start and into everyday continuity. If these Pacers prove to be a solid playoff team this season with promising internal development (particularly for players like Haliburton, Mathurin, and Andrew Nembhard), it could be a signal to accelerate their competitive timeline.

“We can take small jumps here and there, hitting singles,” Buchanan says. “But eventually, we’ve gotta swing for the fences.”

Indiana could create a ton of cap space if it chooses to cut bait on various options, with a free agent class that could include almost-Pacer Kawhi Leonard, former Pacer Paul George, oft-rumored Pacers target Pascal Siakam, and former Hoosier OG Anunoby. Any number of other stars could potentially be available via trade—if those stars are swayed by the pitch Haliburton and the Pacers have so carefully crafted. Haliburton has heard the rebuttals—that you can’t get a star to come play in Indianapolis, just like you couldn’t get a star to come play in Sacramento.

“But I’m from Wisconsin,” he says. “And growing up, it was like: You’re never gonna get anybody to go to Milwaukee. Well, you get Giannis Antetokounmpo, and now people take a pay cut to go play for the Bucks. I’ve seen it firsthand. In my life, I’ve seen it. So I think I play the right brand of basketball that makes people wanna play with me, and that’s not just me, but that’s how this team is coached and the style of basketball we play.”

“With Tyrese Haliburton,” Carlisle says, “all things are possible.”

Indiana’s coach sees greatness in Haliburton, but more than that, he sees shades of a number of all-time greats. The passion of Reggie Miller, “the quintessential greatest Pacer of all time.” The showmanship of Magic, like Tyrese’s father always wanted. There’s some Jason Kidd in the way Haliburton can manipulate the game, Carlisle says, and certainly in the jump passes. Yet in terms of the way Tyrese moves through the world, Carlisle sees a lot of Steve Nash.

“Steve was a guy that whenever he approached one of his teammates, he would put his hand up and make contact and it was just another way to connect,” Carlisle says. “It was almost like there was an electric current going from him to a teammate.”

Haliburton might not have quite the same style of outreach (a bummer for the MBA wannabe-TED Talk industrial complex), but there’s a similar charge in the way he connects. It’s not only reaching out and checking in and making plans. Haliburton, at just 23 years old, is incredibly attuned to the human experience of the game. “He has this feel of when his teammates need something,” Buchanan says. It’s a sense that goes beyond shots and touches, and transcends the tactical balance of how to break down the coverage. The biggest threat to a talented team is always itself. There’s something tugging at the seams of even the best-constructed rosters: hurt feelings, hard negotiations, unsatisfied ambition. One way that Nash made his teams better was by bringing them to an emotional equilibrium.

“There’s responsibility there—responsibility outside of wins and losses, about keeping the team psyche balanced,” Nash says. “Whether that’s taking responsibility for losses, whether that’s keeping the guys light, loose, or calm. Sometimes it’s showing that there’s a passion to win, that the level is not acceptable right now. That’s kind of a part of it, too. You’re the one who’s gonna have to talk. You’re the one who’s gonna have to talk to the press, and take responsibility in that way as well. You have to make sure the moment’s not too big, or that you recognize the energy’s not high enough, or whatever it is. That’s more intense when you are the face of the franchise.”

The trade to the Pacers was a chance for Haliburton to be exactly that: the face of an entire organization. Yet when he initially found out about the deal, he cried. Haliburton was a second-year player who had made himself a part of something—who had built the same kinds of relationships in Sacramento that he’s building now in Indiana. “He put his heart and his mind in it so much that he forgot it was a business,” his father says. “It snuck up on him. And it bit him.”

Hield, who has basically been in the rumor mill since birth, tried to warn him. “New Orleans told me they loved me, too,” he says. “They told me to get a house, so I bought a house. They said I was gonna be there for a long time.” Hield didn’t even get to finish out his rookie season in that house; the Pelicans traded him just a few months in. There were some I-told-you-so’s after Haliburton suffered a similar fate in just his second year, but Hield saw something that a wounded Haliburton couldn’t just yet. This was everything Tyrese wanted. The chance to lead a team. The opportunity to play his natural position. The full confidence of an organization that Haliburton thought he had—but didn’t.

“It’s not the way you wanted it to happen,” Hield remembers telling him, “but now you’re in a situation you can control. You’re not playing where someone else has the ball all the time, or where you have to defer to anybody. Everybody’s deferring to you. So you’ve just gotta grow up fast.”

The new face of the Indiana Pacers gave himself 48 hours to process that fact. Then he laced up his shoes, fired the ball up the floor, and never looked back.