Haliburton keeps belaboring the point

He represents the old and new at his position as he leads the Pacers into the Finals.

Tyrese Haliburton doesn’t have many real birthdays. He came to life on a Feb. 29. Maybe that’s why everything seems so sudden unless you’ve been watching, why he went from a fringe freshman at Iowa State to a point guard in the NBA Finals in the space of eight seasons. He’s an Olympic gold medalist and a 2-time second-team All-NBA selection, and he’s just finishing the first year of a five-year, $244 million contract, and he just turned 25 or, to be technical, six. He obviously isn’t in it for the cakes.

His Indiana Pacers eliminated New York Saturday to win their first Eastern Conference championship since Haliburton was three months old. They play Oklahoma City for the big trophy, with Game 1 on Thursday, a battle between clubs representing the 33rd and 41st largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the country. The Pacers are the city slickers in this matchup, but Haliburton and league MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander have much in common, as the organic stars who sneaked up on the whole industry. They also might have the NBA record for lowest moments of maintenance per dollar earned. Leadership, in their hands, doesn’t have to be angry or performative. If enough people can adjust to no Curry, no LeBron, no Celtics and no Jokic, they might get educated, not just entertained.

In Game 4 of the Knicks series, Haliburton might have had the best playoff game in the history of point guards. He had 32 points, 15 assists, 12 rebounds and zero turnovers. He was the fourth player in NBA history to put up the first three numbers of that line, but the first to do it without an offensive blemish, and he also had four 3-pointers. “I feel like we’re making up numbers,” Haliburton said, but these were very real, and on Sunday he scored 21 with 13 assists, three steals, an uncharacteristic four turnovers, and 9-for-17 shooting. In the fourth quarter he shot 5 of 6 with four assists.

At 6-foot-5 he bridges the generations of point guards. He is both a creative and a functional passer, and he’s in charge of the post patterns that kept beating the Knicks downcourt. But he can also score, and he was the Pacers’ catalyst even though he only ranked 79th in usage rate during the regular season. He was at 21.1, which meant that Pacer possessions ended with Haliburton’s field goal attempts, free throw attempts or turnovers barely one-fifth at the time. Yet he ranked seventh in the league in assist rate, which meant that Haliburton got an assist on nearly 39 percent of the Pacers’ buckets during his minutes. It also meant that Haliburton rarely handled the ball aimlessly, that there was forethought and decisiveness in whatever he did.

You could see the contrast Sunday between Haliburton and Jalen Brunson, the Mighty Mouse of the Knicks. Brunson averaged 30 points a game in the Knicks’ three playoff series. Here, the Pacers targeted Brunson with Andrew Nembhard, who tried to collar Brunson at the midcourt with considerable help from Haliburton and/or Aaron Nesmith. In Game 6 Brunson was 8 for 18 with five turnovers and scored 19, with only four in the fourth quarter, and his domination of the ball created 24-second clock pressure for his teammates. And even with that fierce defense, the Pacers put Brunson on the free throw line only twice.

For the 11th time in the playoffs, the Pacers shot over 50 percent, and their bench wiped out New York’s, 38-20.

Haliburton was the 12th overall pick, by Sacramento, in 2020, and was traded to Indiana for Domantas Sabonis 51 games deep into his second year. He had shown enough at Iowa State, with his wingspan and his court sense, even though he broke his wrist in February of his sophomore year, and then turned pro. But, this season, Haliburton was also voted the league’s most overrated player by anonymous colleagues, and most of his life has been devoted to convincing people, including himself.

He thought he might have to redshirt at Iowa State, which recruited him late after Haliburton had mentally committed to Northern Iowa. Instead he started for the Cyclones practically from Day One. The same thing happened when Haliburton was younger, before he led his Oshkosh High team to a Wisconsin high school championship. He was on a Milwaukee AAU team that included Tyler Herro, now the Miami Heat sharpshooter, and Herro’s dad coached that team and more or less disinvited Haliburton from returning. He joined another AAU team, one that wasn’t invvolved with shoe companies and thus didn’t have as much visibility, but he made strides while he was coached by Bryan Johnikin. Haliburton had a slow-developing shot that he brought from his knees, and one day he had it blocked by Johnikin’s son, who was three years old. That wasn’t easy to deal with, but Johnikin smoothed out the rough edges over the years, and Haliburton’s attitude took care of the rest.

Steve Prohm, Haliburton’s coach at Iowa State, predicted that Haliburton would become governor of Wisconsin someday, and Johnikin called him “Little Obama.” Even in youth ball, Haliburton would wait for the substitutes to come in, and he’d make sure they had a chance to score. “They’ll remember that, the rest of their lives,” he reasoned. Empathy is not a naturally-occurring resource in NBA locker rooms, but every Pacer seems to have his own moment. On Sunday backup center Thomas Bryant canned two important 3-pointers from the corner, which seemed odd until you learned that the 7-footer had put 131 of them during the regular season. When shots present themselves, none of the Pacers look over their shoulders before shooting them. In this series alone, seven different Pacers had at least one game of at least 18 points.

Game 6 also wrapped up TNT’s involvement in the NBA. “Inside The NBA,” the weekly house party featuring Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, Kenny Smith and moderator Ernie Johnson, will be seen on ESPN and ABC next season. Discerning viewers often watched “Inside’s” pre-game,, halftime and postgame hijinks, then flipped to something else while the actual games were happening. Presumably we’ll continue to see Shaqtin’ The Fool and Who He Play For? And presumably Barkley will continue to weigh in on the circumference of San Antonio women. The crew managed to say goodbye without tears on Sunday night, but the rest of us are a little uneasy about the future, even though the show will be produced by the same staff. Sending “Inside The NBA” to ESPN is a little like sending your kids to stay with a vaguely disquieting uncle, but we’ll see.

Indiana’s ride probably sputters to a halt against Oklahoma City, maybe in five games or fewer. And the more Haliburton hears about that, the better Indiana’s chances will get. He’s already a master of surprise, if not birthdays.