Doyel: Pacers could taste NBA title. Now, we're all sick to our stomachs for what comes next
OKLAHOMA CITY – The locker isn't empty, but almost. A small bag of chips on the cabinet, unopened. A few hangers on the overhead bar, empty. A rolling piece of black luggage nearby, zipped up and ready to go. If it belongs to Tyrese Haliburton — and this was his spot in the visitors' locker room Sunday night at Paycom Center, site of Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals — someone else will need to grab it. Haliburton left the locker room with his hands full.
You know. The crutches.
Haliburton and the Indiana Pacers are the talk of the NBA today, not the Oklahoma City Thunder, and that's not the way these things normally go. Normally we celebrate our winners. The team that didn't win — I'm not calling anyone in this series a loser — gets a pat on the head, words of consolation, congratulations on having a nice season. Better luck next time.
This wasn't normal. The fourth-seeded Pacers galvanized a city, and then beyond, by slaying Milwaukee and its MVP dragon, Giannis Antetokounmpo — and then by eliminating top-seeded Cleveland and third-seeded New York. They had a little something for everyone: The dashing star in Haliburton, his workmanlike sidekick in Pascal Siakam, the longstanding, beloved veteran getting his long-deserved run to the NBA Finals (Myles Turner). The Pacers had flamboyance (high-flyin' Obi Toppin), humbleness (spotlight-avoiding Andrew Nembhard), quiet professionalism (Aaron Nesmith) and uncommon heart (T.J. McConnell).
Doyel: Haliburton injury a cruel way to end Pacers' magic ride
This wasn't close to normal. The Pacers pulled off comeback after comeback, winning a trio of games — one in each of the first three rounds, against the Bucks, Cavaliers and Knicks — that wouldn't have gotten odds from Las Vegas. Why bother? The odds against a team winning all three of those games, against those deficits, with that little time on the clock? Math puts those odds at 17 billion-to-1.
Math never could measure heart.
The star of those comebacks in the first three rounds, and then of the Game 1 stunner at Oklahoma City in these 2025 NBA Finals, was Tyrese Haliburton. In one moment, Haliburton is being voted the most overrated player in the league in an anonymous poll from his peers, a perfect representation of this gutless age of social media. In the next, he's hitting three game-winners in the final seconds, and forcing overtime with a buzzer-beater in a fourth game the Pacers eventually won.
'He authored one of the great individual playoff runs in the history of the NBA,' Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said. 'It was something that no one's ever seen.'
And then the story took a gruesome turn. Haliburton, playing on a strained right calf he suffered early in Game 5, was having his best start in these 2025 NBA playoffs — nine points in the first five minutes, and now he's blowing past OKC's Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and heading to the rim — when he went down, all of it happening so fast, then caught by slow-motion:
Something in Haliburton's lower right leg pops. The Achilles, according to his father, John Haliburton. When it happens, Haliburton does what so many victims of an Achilles injury have done before: He looks over his shoulder in shock, in pain, trying to see who just hit him with a baseball bat. That's how badly it hurts.
Now he's lying on the court, pounding the floor slowly, rhythmically, helplessly. He's crying, and while the physical pain of a torn Achilles is brutal, this looks like emotional anguish. He knows what has just happened. He knows what it means. There are 43 minutes left in the biggest game in franchise history, but for Haliburton it's over — his season, his NBA Finals, his Game 7.
What will become of his 2025-26 season?
What will become of the Pacers?
This story could go one of two ways, with two possible endings. Neither is promising. One is devastating.
What do you want first, the bad news?
Or the bad news?
Listen, this story is going to take some real emotional maturity on everyone's part, starting with Tyrese Haliburton. He's the main victim here, the one facing the worst road, the one dealt the most cruel hand. Let's make that clear, so we can move on with empathy for him as we take stock of what just happened, and what will come next.
What happened? You saw it. It was devastation. Not a lot more to say about it.
What comes next? A different kind of devastation, one that — unlike what happened during Game 7 — can be stomached, will have to be stomached, over the course of the coming days, weeks, months. That gives everyone time to adjust to the Pacers' new reality, and to adjust fully we have to say goodbye to what we thought was their reality in 2025-26:
Potential NBA champions.
With a healthy Haliburton, they were going to enter next season as the betting favorite in the Eastern Conference, and while the Thunder could be favored to win the next three or four NBA titles, the Pacers have already shown they can compete with OKC.
Without Haliburton? Let's say he returns late next season, as the recovery timeline suggests is possible. The Pacers will be near the salary cap limit if not well over it, especially if they re-sign Myles Turner, so their current roster — deep as it is — will mostly have to suffice. Is this a playoff team for 60 or more games, with Andrew Nembhard and T.J. McConnell as the top two ballhandlers? Maybe.
And if Haliburton comes back, gets his feet under him, connects with his teammates — who will have spent five months learning to play a different way — and helps get the Pacers into the sixth or seventh seed? Maybe they get hot again. Maybe they win a playoff series, then get to pick late in the first round of the 2026 NBA draft.
Compared to what next season could've been, that's dreary.
But what could happen instead? That's demoralizing.
What you are about to read? Nobody wants it to happen. That includes me, OK? A boss of mine once told me: 'Readers can't read your mind, even as they read your words, so draw them a roadmap so they don't get lost.'
Don't get lost here: Nobody wants this to happen. But…
What if Tyrese Haliburton doesn't come back next season? That's possible. It's probably likely. Typically this a full season, missed. And this wasn't typical. Haliburton was injured literally in the last game on the last day for the 2024-25 NBA season. A return the following season, even in February or March, seems borderline impossible.
So then…
What if Myles Turner leaves? Listen, could you blame him? Could you? He's a free agent and the Los Angeles Lakers are going to flirt with him, and might even offer him more money than the Pacers can, given their (unfair) financial freedom as an NBA franchise in Los Angeles.
Turner is entering his 11th season in the NBA. He just got a taste of the NBA Finals, and loved it. You heard him on the microphone after the Pacers beat the Knicks to win the Eastern Conference Finals. He was ecstatic.
So now, at age 29, Turner enters his 11th season with two options: Come back to Indiana and play for a team that will have to overachieve to win a single playoff series, a team that might do well to reach the play-in game because let's be honest: As good and deep as this roster is, Haliburton is the key that unlocks everything: All that pace, all that transition, all that space on the floor.
That's waiting for Myles Turner behind Door 1. Behind Door 2?
LeBron James. Luka Doncic. The Los Angeles Lakers. That franchise, that city. And the Lakers are willing to spend whatever they can to make a run in 2026, in what could be LeBron's final season.
If you're Myles Turner, what do you choose?
This is not good. When Tyrese Haliburton was crying there on the court, he knew what had just happened … to Game 7, and to the following season. No, he wasn't thinking about Myles Turner. But he was thinking, had to be thinking — could you blame him for thinking? — about the timing of an injury that had just wrecked one season, two hours from a possible NBA championship, and wrecked the following season as well.
Time for us to pay what we owe. The Pacers took us on a ride this season, something beyond our wildest dreams. Let's return the favor next season.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Threads, or on BlueSky and Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar, or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar. Subscribe to the free weekly Doyel on Demand newsletter.
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