Pacers vs. Thunder NBA Finals: Tyrese Haliburton's devastating injury a brutal reminder of the precariousness of the game
Tyrese Haliburton knew. He knew from the second he planted to try to drive, slipped, hit the ground and lost the ball midway through the first quarter that he wasn't right — that the 'lower leg thing' that had him limping after Game 2 of the 2025 NBA Finals had snowballed into something worse.
But it was Game 5 of a tied championship series, and the sun around which the Indiana Pacers revolves knew how much more difficult the Oklahoma City Thunder would be to topple if he wasn't out there giving them advanced math problems to solve on every defensive possession.
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Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle said after Game 5 that he and his staff were 'concerned at halftime' about Haliburton's movement on that strained calf — but that his superstar point guard 'insisted on playing' the rest of the way.
'I mean, it's the NBA Finals. It's the Finals, man,' Haliburton said after Indiana's Game 5 loss. 'I've worked my whole life to be here and I want to be out there to compete. Help my teammates any way I can. I was not great tonight by any means, but it's not really a thought of mine to not play here.
'If I can walk, then I want to play.'
A follow-up MRI confirmed Haliburton was working on a strained right calf — an injury that, if he'd picked it up during the regular season, may well have put him on the shelf for weeks. In the Finals, though, with the Pacers' backs against the wall, Haliburton and Indiana's medical and training teams explored every option to get him back on the floor as safely as possible.
Tyrese Haliburton of the Indiana Pacers remains down on the court during the first quarter as teammate T.J. McConnell and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of the Oklahoma City Thunder check on him in Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals at Paycom Center on June 22, 2025, in Oklahoma City. (Photo by)
(Justin Ford via Getty Images)
'I think I have to be as smart as I want to be,' Haliburton said at the Pacers' practice session before Game 6. 'Have to understand the risks, ask the right questions. I'm a competitor. I want to play … I have a lot of trust in our medical staff. I have a lot of trust in our organization to make the right decision.
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'I think there's been many situations through the course of my career where they've trusted me on my body. … They trust me to make the right decision on my body when the power is in my hands. I'm trying to try my best to do that.'
So Haliburton played — and he played great, scoring 14 points with five assists and three 3-pointers in 23 minutes, during which the Pacers outscored the Thunder by 25 points, to help propel Indiana to a series-leveling victory to force a Game 7.
'I just look at it as I want to be out there to compete with my brothers,' Haliburton said after Game 6. 'These are guys that I'm willing to go to war with, and we've had such a special year, and we have a special bond as a group, and, you know, I think I'd beat myself up if I didn't give it a chance.'
That chance came only after what Haliburton termed 'an honest conversation' with Carlisle.
'You know, if I didn't look like myself and was hurting the team, like, sit me down,' Haliburton said. 'Obviously, I want to be on the floor. But I want to win more than anything … like I said, if I can walk, I want to be out there.'
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And so, after two more days of round-the-clock treatment that he said Saturday left him 'pretty much in the same standpoint I was before Game 6 — a little stiff, a little sore, Haliburton was out there to start Game 7: the ultimate competitive crucible, the proving ground for the immortals, the situation Haliburton said he'd 'dreamed of being in [for] my whole life.' And he was throwing flames.
Five shots in the first five minutes — an extremely aggressive start for a player at times derided for his pass-first play. Nine points on three deep triples to stake the visiting Pacers to an early lead. Confident, sneering; the wolf at the door.
And then, midway through the first, Haliburton caught a pass, planted to try to drive, slipped, hit the ground and lost the ball … and he knew.
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Knew from the second he made impact. Slapping the floor, again and again; burying his face in his forearm; grimacing, crying, screaming no, no, no.
He couldn't walk. He couldn't be out there.
'I couldn't imagine playing the biggest game of my life and something like that happening,' Thunder superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said after the game. 'It's not fair. But competition isn't fair sometimes.'
At halftime, Haliburton's father, John, confirmed to ESPN's Lisa Salters the worst-case scenario diagnosis that everyone from NBA superstars to fans on their couches had immediately made: It was the Achilles, and while we don't know yet the severity of the injury, it was impossible not to think of Kevin Durant, and Damian Lillard, and Jayson Tatum, and the miserable gnawing left in the pits of our stomachs as we watched them first writhe, then hobble, off the floor and out of sight.
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The Pacers fought like champions after losing their heart and soul, rallying to take a 48-47 lead into halftime — where, Carlisle said, Haliburton 'was in the locker room, and he was very much a part of a group that believed that they could do this.' (Asked later what Haliburton said to the team at that time, though, Pacers center Myles Turner said, 'Tyrese was getting medical attention at halftime.')
Indiana couldn't sustain that surge of adrenaline, though, scoring just 20 points in 23 possessions in the third quarter and committing eight turnovers leading to 18 Thunder points. It was a stretch that laid bare just how badly these Pacers need Haliburton — how everything Indiana is on the offensive end flows from him and through him, and how, without his visionary pace-pushing playmaking, the Pacers just aren't the Pacers — and one that blew Game 7 wide open, sending Oklahoma City on the way to the NBA championship.
Haliburton couldn't walk; he couldn't be out there. But, with the aid of crutches, he could greet his teammates after the game, congratulating them on a race well run, offering what he could in one of the darkest moments of all of their careers.
'That's who he is as a person, a teammate,' said backup point guard T.J. McConnell, who tried his damnedest to pick up the slack in Haliburton's absence, scoring 16 points with six rebounds and three assists off the bench. 'He put his ego aside constantly. He could have been in the locker room feeling sorry for himself after something like that happened, but he wasn't. He was up greeting us. A lot of us were hurting from the loss, and he was up there consoling us. That's who Tyrese Haliburton is. He's just the greatest, man.'
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Haliburton spent the last two months captivating the basketball-watching world, delivering moment after moment, hitting some of the greatest clutch shots we've ever seen in the postseason — building a résumé as one of the premier crunch-time assassins the NBA's ever seen in real time. He deserved a better ending than this; the Pacers, their fans, all of us deserved a better ending than this. But competition isn't fair sometimes.
'What happened with Tyrese, all of our hearts dropped,' Carlisle said. 'But he will be back. I don't have any medical information about what may or may not have happened, but he'll be back in time, and I believe he'll make a full recovery.'
Haliburton turns 26 in February and is still just approaching his prime; as a big guard whose game is built on his processing speed, passing touch and 3-point shooting, it seems reasonable to be optimistic about his chances of remaining a highly effective player when he returns to the court. The question now hanging over the Pacers' franchise, though: When will he make that return? And what will the team look like when he does?
Heading into Game 7, Indiana appeared to be poised for an extended run of contention at the top of an Eastern Conference that figures to be in flux. The Celtics, still reeling from the loss of Tatum, could find themselves needing to shed talent to pare down a staggering luxury tax bill. The Bucks, likewise, will be without Lillard, and enter yet another summer facing existential questions surrounding the prospect of trading Giannis Antetokounmpo. The Knicks just fired the head coach who brought them to the Eastern Conference finals, and have yet to hire his replacement. It remains to be seen whether the Cavaliers will change course after winning 64 games but again failing to advance past the second round — thanks largely to Haliburton and these Pacers.
There is no clear and dominant force in the East — no skyscraping juggernaut standing in the way of a team whose relentlessly frenetic style had made them the conference's unsolvable equation. And the Pacers, fresh off consecutive Eastern Conference finals berths and a trip to the NBA Finals, already have nine of their top 10 players locked in for next season, with plenty of pre-free-agency reporting suggesting that ownership's willing to finally go into the luxury tax to retain the 10th — starting center Turner, the floor-spacing 5 who helps unlock Haliburton's freewheeling playmaking and who defended like an absolute demon against Oklahoma City.
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Maybe that's still ownership's plan. Maybe Pacers brass looks at what'll be left in the cupboard while Haliburton rehabs — Pascal Siakam, an absolute dynamo in this postseason; a ton of young talent (Andrew Nembhard, Aaron Nesmith, Obi Toppin, Bennedict Mathurin, Ben Sheppard, Jarace Walker, rising sophomore Johnny Furphy) with room to grow; Carlisle, who just burnished his reputation as one of the game's premier tacticians — and thinks that, with a returning Turner, Indiana still has a chance to make the playoffs for the third straight season, give its rabid hometown fans a team worth showing up to support, and hold down the fort until its signature star can return to lead a roster built on continuity and what Turner famously called 'the power of friendship.'
If they take a more jaundiced view, though, and come away thinking that a team built to very exacting specifications cannot properly function without its very particular pilot … well, organizations have made decisions to pivot — to trade present-tense contributors for future assets or financial flexibility reflecting a substantially changed competitive timeline — based on a hell of a lot less.
That's the cruel trick of it all, the devastating dislocation of a moment like Haliburton and the Pacers experienced midway through the first quarter on Sunday: that these opportunities are so rare, so fleeting, so difficult to put yourself in position to grasp, and when one slips through your fingers, or is wrested away from you by fickle fate, it can be so, so difficult to get back.
'Chuck Daly once said: If people had any idea how difficult it was to win one game in the NBA — in the regular season, one game — you know, they would be shocked,' Carlisle said after Game 6. '... Not everybody's been deep in the playoffs or to the Finals. But I guarantee you that people have a very good idea what goes on, and how difficult it is to get here, and how challenging it is.'
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That's why Siakam, who won an NBA championship in his third season and wandered for the next six years in search of a shot at a second, spent the last two months telling his teammates and the media that he wasn't going to take this opportunity for granted. That's why Carlisle consistently refused to look back at the past or forward into the future in his news conferences, repeatedly snapping his and his team's focus back to the present, to the process, to the pursuit of this one singular goal. That's why Haliburton was willing to do whatever he could to put himself in position to seize his opportunity.
'We've got one game,' Haliburton said after Game 6. 'One game. Nothing that's happened before matters, and nothing that's going to happen after matters. It's all about that one game.'
After that game, though, the sun still rises and you have to face tomorrow. And that's why what happened on Sunday night — not just losing that one game, but losing Haliburton, maybe for an entire year; losing this opportunity without any promise that a franchise that's yet to win an NBA championship will ever see another — hurts so, so much.
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