'I'm not taking this for granted.' How Tyrese Haliburton is preparing for first NBA Finals

Indianapolis Star

2 days ago

INDIANAPOLIS – The first NBA Finals Tyrese Haliburton "truthfully" remembers watching — the first one he didn't just notice but sat down and consumed — was in 2011. He was a LeBron James fan, so at that particular moment, that made him a Miami Heat fan.
James had made "The Decision" one year prior to leave Cleveland to join the Heat with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh and they ripped through the Eastern Conference playoffs to the NBA Finals in their first year together, so Haliburton was expecting to see James crowned a champion for the first time. But the Heat met a Dallas Mavericks team with less acclaim but plenty of talent and a coach named Rick Carlisle and they lost that series to the Mavs in six games.
"I hated Rick for that," Haliburton said. "... I definitely couldn't stand the Mavs and Rick for that at that time."
Flash forward 14 years, however, and Haliburton has an Olympic gold medal in large part because of James' heroics and he now is in the NBA Finals for the first time with Carlisle, who will coach for his first championship since that 2011 team.
Obviously, Haliburton has moved past the grudge he held as an 11-year-old. For the past three-plus seasons, Haliburton has asked Carlisle and other members of his staff who were around in 2011 about what made that team work and why it was able to take down a Miami team with so much star power.
"The biggest thing is they went into that situation similar to how we've went into a lot of our playoff runs," Haliburton said. "Just being the underdog and knowing that a lot of people weren't picking them and just kinda going into with a — I don't know a better way to put it. Kind of with an F-it, (expletive)-it mentality. Sorry, I didn't want to cuss, but I had to right there, I didn't know how to get it across. But just going into it that way and as long as the guys in our locker room and the people in this building believe, then anything is possible."
For Haliburton this season has truly proven anything is possible. His grandest dreams are coming true at the end of a season that started with some of his lowest moments as a player in his basketball life.
Toward the end of November he was experiencing something beyond frustration as he went through one of the most miserable shooting slumps in his life while the Pacers struggled with injuries en route to a 10-15 start. But thanks to support from teammates and friends he managed to get his mind right and worked his way back to All-Star caliber play. He actually missed the All-Star game but played some of the best basketball of his life after the All-Star break to earn third-team All-NBA honors.
"The beginning of the year this year, no one will ever know how difficult that was for him," Carlisle said. "Through it all he may have missed one game in the first 30. He kept playing. He kept believing in himself, engaging with his teammates, kept a great attitude. There's nothing more you can ask for."
By the playoffs he had his confidence all the way back and in the postseason he's authored three shots that will earn a measure of immortality in Pacers history — the driving layup to beat the Bucks in Game 5 of the first round, the step-back 3 to beat the Cavs in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference semis and the high-off-the-rim jumper that sent Game 1 against the Knicks into overtime. He's averaging 18.8 points and 9.8 assists per game in these playoffs and even the numbers don't quite capture his total impact.
The struggles of the early part of the season have led to him viewing these playoffs differently than last year's. In retrospect, he believes he may have spent too much of last year's playoffs thinking of that run as the first of many or as an early step in a gradual rise. When the Pacers struggled early, he realized they weren't guaranteed to get another chance.
"This is a really exciting time for me personally to have this opportunity," Haliburton said. "This is something I've wanted to do my whole life. Last year, having playoff success in my first playoff run and being unsuccessful to start the season, for me I thought a lot about, wow, maybe I took last year for granted. I didn't know what the playoffs were going to look like as the year was going on. I didn't know if we'd be a play-in team or where we'd stack up in the end with how we were playing early in the year. I'm definitely not taking this for granted. Learning to appreciate every day and remember all these days as best as I can."
Haliburton said, as usual, he's tried to pick Pascal Siakam's brain to get a sense of what's coming as Siakam won a title with the Raptors in 2019. He knows the situation isn't going to be exactly the same, but any amount of foresight is helpful.
"We talked about it yesterday in film as far as all the distractions, all the things that come with playing in the Finals," Haliburton said. "We've had many conversations with it. I've had many conversations with Pascal leading up to this just in passing, randomly just sitting on the plane. 'Yo, tell me about this game in that playoff run.' That's part of it. I'm really excited about it. We just continue to make more memories and do more stuff together. ... I'm sure some stuff has changed, but the main thing remains the main thing. The emotions, the energy in the building is going to be a lot of fun. That's something I'm looking forward to a lot."
He also knows what's coming is a major challenge. The Thunder team the Pacers are about to face don't come to the Finals with nearly the fanfare that Heat team did, but it won 10 more games in the regular season than the 2010-11 Miami squad, posting the fifth most wins in NBA history at 68-14. The Pacers are close to doing something the franchise hasn't done since it moved to the NBA from the ABA, but they have every reason not to get ahead of themselves. And that allows Haliburton to continue to stay in the moment.
"It's easy for human nature to set in and be like, 'Yo, we're four wins away from a championship,'" Haliburton said. "'All we gotta do is this, this and that and we're gonna be a champion and this is what the parade is gonna look like.' It's easy to do that. But just trying to be grounded and be where my feet are and take it one day at a time. Because if we're able to do what we set out to do it's going to be really special."