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On Tuesday afternoon, ESPN analyst and former NBA player Kendrick Perkins posited that the bar for true NBA superstardom is selling out road arenas, and followed it up with: "I don't know if Tyrese Haliburton is selling out arenas" as the panel collectively chuckled.
In other words, Tyrese Haliburton is not a superstar.
This term can mean different things to different people, and if you're someone who defines superstardom by the marketability or mass popularity of a given player, it's not an insane take to suggest Haliburton falls short of that bar.
But if we're talking pure basketball? Haliburton is rapidly and irrefutably shooting up the ranks of not just the best point guards in the league, but the best players period. We saw it again on Tuesday night as Hali hung 32 points, 15 assists, 12 rebounds and four steals on the Knicks in Indiana's 130-121 Game 4 victory. He did not turn the ball over once.
The series now shifts back to New York for Game 5 on Thursday with the Pacers up 3-1 and one victory away from the franchise's first Finals appearance in a quarter century.
Remember when everyone called that Domantas Sabonis-Haliburton trade one of the rare win-win swaps? Well, there are degrees of winning, and the Pacers are reaping rewards that even they couldn't have seen coming as Haliburton continues to validate himself, and by extension his team, among the league's elite class.
It's going to be hard for a lot of people to admit this. The Pacers still feel small time. Haliburton shoots funky and doesn't scream superstar with his physical traits. The dude is out here looking like a clone of Steve Urkel for crying out loud.
But don't think for a second this is a dig. If you were a 90s kid you know that Steve Urkel secretly ruled. And so does Haliburton, who is now the first player in history to record a 30-15-10 playoff game with zero turnovers. Have you any idea how difficult it is to play as aggressively as Haliburton did on Tuesday night, against the physicality with which defenses are being allowed to play in this postseason, and not commit a single turnover? The word insane gets thrown around too easily in sports parlance, but this line is insane.
Haliburton is an old-school point guard with all the modern bells and whistles. He takes care of the ball (only 1.6 turnovers per game this season with a 5-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio in the playoffs). He gets everyone involved, an actual in-the-flesh pass-first maestro who has averaged 10 assists per game over the past two seasons, but don't think for a second he can't score almost at will. He can. He just does it more selectively. Or situationally. If you called him a taller Steve Nash, high praise as that is, you wouldn't be out of line.
And like Nash, Haliburton delivers all this fundamental execution with a flare that would belie -- if not downright chide -- more conservative floor generals of older eras. He can look like he's flying a little bit reckless out there, but as Pacers Rick Carlisle astutely noted after Game 4, "he's doing this within the system" and "there isn't a lot of freelance stuff."
This is sort of Haliburton's superpower, this ability to disguise poise as pizzazz. He appears to be operating at random but it's all actually pretty rigid. It's not easy to pull off cocky and careful in the same act, to be in total control of an offense without actually have to control everything, but Haliburton does it all so naturally and so willingly.
In this time of ball-dominant point guards, Haliburton is happy -- his critics would say he's sometimes too happy -- to take a scoring backseat. He passes ahead. Organizes an equal-opportunity offense that moves at 100 mph. One person can't dominate the ball in an offense like that, even someone as gifted as Haliburton, who is logging just a 22.7% usage rate in these playoffs, just a tick up from his role-player-esque 21.0 regular-season rate.
Compare that to Knicks superstar point guard Jalen Brunson, who was at 28.9% in the regular season and has shot up to 32% in the playoffs. Brunson is incredible. This is no knock on him. We're just talking about two very different point guards, one who shares the ball and one who dominates it, and this series feels like a little bit of a referendum on those two styles.
Brunson is probably the better player, but is he better for a team? Right now, it's perhaps not looking that way. Brunson is averaging 33 PPG in the series against Haliburton's 24. Haliburton is averaging 11 assists against Brunson's five. But impact often lies between the lines of traditional numbers. The Pacers are winning, and no, this series is not all about Brunson vs. Haliburton. The Knicks are losing a game of depth and pace. But at least the latter is a microcosm of point guard matchup.
The Pacers play fast because Haliburton is always looking to push and move the ball. As the pace picks up, so too does the inclusion. Everyone is involved and in rhythm. On Tuesday, Haliburton logged five assists to Aaron Nesmith, four to Pascal Siakam, two to Obi Toppin, and one each to Andrew Nembhard, Tony Bradley, Myles Turner and Bennedict Mathurin. The Pacers tallied 29 team assists in Game 4 and lead the playoffs at 28.3 a game. That ball moves.
By contrast, the Knicks are averaging just 13.4 team assists per game in the playoffs, which ranks 15th out of the 16 teams that got in. Brunson is accounting for more than seven of those assists. Do the math, and non-Brunson Knicks are generating a grand total of six assists a night.
Throw in Brunson's 30 PPG in the playoffs, and he is, with respect to some of the huge performances the Knicks have gotten from Karl-Anthony Towns in these playoffs, an individual trying to beat a team. Every time Brunson touches the ball he keeps it, on average, for six-and-a-half seconds before either shooting or moving it.
More times than not, the ball eventually comes back to him, at which point he dribbles it six more times. This is a giant load to carry even for a player as talented as Brunson, and a lot of standing around for all the other guys. It isn't how most support staffs prefer to come to work. Former NBA point guard Jeff Teague recently spoke on the offensive disconnect that can come with this ball-dominant dynamic.
This is an oversimplification. The Knicks aren't losing these games because Brunson is hogging the ball. This is how their offense is designed, and he's an absolutely incredible, bordering on unstoppable, shot maker. Indiana is, top to bottom, a better team. Deeper and faster with better shooters. New York wouldn't be anywhere near a conference finals without Brunson. Not every team can have a Stephen Curry that moves like a deer. Nothing is set in stone in terms of what works and what doesn't. It's all circumstantial and subject to change.
But it is a legitimate question that teams have long begun asking themselves: Can you win a championship with a ball-dominant point guard -- a small, defensively challenged one at that -- as a virtual one-man offense?
It didn't work for James Harden in Houston, although it probably would have if the Warriors didn't exist. It never worked for Damian Lillard in Portland. The Mavericks traded Luka Dončić in part because they don't want to play that way. Trae Young is as talented as any offensive creator in the league and the Hawks can't get above .500.
It's not to say you have to be a pass-heavy team to win a title. The Celtics barely pass at all, but at full health they have a small army of individual scorers, and they're also proving to be more the exception than the rule.
Four teams are currently still alive in these playoffs, and three of them rank in the top five in assist points created -- Indiana at No. 1 (73.3 entering Tuesday), Oklahoma City at 64.6 and Minnesota at 64.3. Meanwhile, New York ranks 14th at 51.3. The individual toll might be starting to multiply for Brunson, who managed two points on a garbage-time layup in the fourth quarter of Game 4.
Haliburton, on the other hand, picks and chooses his nights to prioritize scoring. Tuesday was clearly one of them. He was hunting shots from the jump. But as Carlisle said, even Haliburton's heavy scoring nights are coming within an inclusive framework. He controls the ball for more than two fewer seconds per touch than Brunson.
This is how Haliburton could enter Tuesday night shooting 32% from 3 in the playoffs and still have his team in control of the conference finals, because the Pacers, by design, aren't entirely dependent on his scoring or his shooting to compete at the highest level. They beat you in the aggregate.
Perhaps that's why people remain hesitant to elevate Haliburton into the top tier of the superstar conversation, because he's regarded as a part of the Pacers' attack rather than the sum of it. Maybe it's because he rode the bench in the Olympics. His funny-looking shot doesn't help. Whatever the reason, if you're not up for changing your mind after what Haliburton did on Tuesday night, or what the Pacers have been doing all postseason, you aren't ever going to come around. Too bad for you. Because by the time you do, the bandwagon is going to be full.