22-05-2025
Are the Pacers the greatest comeback team in NBA history?
The legend started long before the Reggie Miller choke sign was resurrected in Madison Square Garden Wednesday night.
In the regular season, Tyrese Haliburton and the Pacers broke out a football play and hit an insane game-winner to beat the Bucks.
TYRESE HALIBURTON OH MY GOODNESS!!!!
FADING TRIPLE TO TIE IT AND THE FOUL 🔥🔥
Get to TNT for the final seconds of Bucks/Pacers!
Haliburton was just getting started. In the first round of the playoffs, Indiana trailed Milwaukee by seven with 40 seconds left in overtime of Game 5, but won it to send the Bucks fishing.
TYRESE HALIBURTON GAME WINNER 🚨
HE SENDS THE BUCKS HOME IN GAME 5
In Game 2 of the second round, the Pacers trailed the Cavaliers by seven inside of a minute to go, but then this happened.
TYRESE HALIBURTON WINS GAME 2 FOR THE PACERS 😱🤯
WHAT. A. WILD. PLAY.
Wednesday night was the wildest comeback of all — Indiana was down 14 with 2:50 left in the game but got red hot behind Aaron Nesmith's 3-point barrage and scored 23 points in the final 3:14 to come back and force overtime on what was the wildest shot of these playoffs.
Get into the paint.
Retreat to 3.
Launch.
Back rim.
Way up in the air.
GOOD.
We're still watching Haliburton's jumper to send Game 1 into OT like 😱
It leads us to this inescapable conclusion:
The Indian Pacers are the greatest comeback team in NBA history.
Sure, other teams have had some shocking comebacks, but this many in all these clutch situations? This many playoff comebacks? If you need more convincing, there is this stat from Tom Haberstroh (his The Finder substack is a must-read):
This season, Tyrese Haliburton has shot 12-of-14 on shots to tie or go ahead in the final two minutes.
How do the Pacers keep doing this?
'We've had a lot of these games this year, we've probably had a dozen of them throughout the season,' Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said. 'A lot of the games early we were struggling were games we had to pull out, they were clutch games when we weren't playing particularly well…
'It's a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. It's not easy.'
The Knicks had been clutch this postseason as well behind Jalen Brunson, and they weren't as terrible in the final minutes of Wednesday night as they are being portrayed in some corners: They made a couple of plays, but they also had one bad Brunson turnover, plus too many empty possessions and missed free throws.
Indiana grabbed Game 1 and took it more than New York gave it away.
That's because the Pacers are the greatest comeback team in NBA history.
