Since being acquired from the Sacramento Kings back in 2022, Tyrese Haliburton has put himself into the conversation of the best Indiana Pacers players of all time.
With each season, Haliburton has continued to get better. From good player to star; from star to All-Star; from All-Star to superstar. And now, Haliburton is the main guy on a Pacers team with a legitimate shot at an NBA title.
Haliburton leads the team at all times, but in clutch moments, he hits another level. As seen in Game One of their Eastern Conference finals series against the New York Knicks, while the Pacers needed the history-making heroics of Aaron Nesmith to make the game close, it was Haliburton who won it. He came through yet again in the clutch, hitting the game-tying basket in regulation as the Pacers closed out an epic 138-135 comeback victory.
Closing out the games, and coming through in the clutch moments, is simply what Haliburton does.
Far Clear Of The Competition
Tom Haberstroh of Yahoo! Sports captured that late-game excellence with one simple observation. Not only does Haliburton make more than the average number of shots with the game on the line – he hits nearly all of them, having hit 12 of 14 shots to either tie the score or go ahead in the final two minutes of all games this season.
Mr. Statistician Face Man
This is crazy: Tyrese Haliburton is now 12 of 14 on shots to tie or go ahead in the final 2:00 this season. With a bunch of 3s in there.
He’s effectively shooting over 100 percent.
To put that into some context, Haberstroh plotted Haliburton’s name along with many other NBA stars to illustrate quite how stark of an anomaly his performance is. Three-time MVP Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets, for example, has scored one more basket in such situations than Haliburton, but has done so with less than half of the efficiency.
Jokic scores some big baskets, including a ridiculously-diffcult turn-around three-pointer to tie Game Five of Denver’s Western Conference Semi-Finals series against the Oklahoma City Thunder last week with only 100 seconds left. But as good as Jokic is, some is not all. Haliburton, near-enough, hit them all.
Haliburton Outperforming League MVPs
Earlier in the postseason, Aaron Gordon of the Denver Nuggets was statistically the best clutch player in the NBA playoffs. However, Gordon and his Nuggets team are back at home, having lost their series against the Thunder in seven games. Neither he nor Jokic could hold off the barrage of the Thunder’s defence forever, and there are no more clutch moments for them to have.
By the same measure used for Gordon, then, Haliburton now stands alone in the playoffs as the clutchest player. Per Inpredictable’s clutch rankings, Haliburton has distanced himself from Gordon and is more than twice as good in the clutch as the player in third place, Karl-Anthony Towns of the Knicks.
This postseason performance is no anomaly and comes off the back of an exceptionally strong clutch regular season. Haliburton’s clutch ranking during the season’s first 82 games was ranked third in the league, behind only the aforementioned Jokic and LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers.
Haliburton is keeping the company of MVP winners, and has outperformed both them and everyone else in the final two minutes, when basketball games matter the most. At this rate, perhaps he will become an MVP himself some day.