Tyrese Haliburton returned to live NBA action on 7 October, playing 16 minutes and finishing with seven points and six assists in the Indiana Pacers’ 123-112 preseason win over the Minnesota Timberwolves. It was his first game since tearing his right Achilles during Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals, and it came 16 months after the injury.
The two-time All-Star guard had waited patiently, then less patiently, on the sideline. The Pacers played in Ames, Iowa, at Iowa State University, Haliburton’s alma mater, which made it a two-part homecoming. It was his first game at his college arena in six years. Students lined up the night before to get into the student section and grab a yellow shirt bearing his face and the moniker “Cyclone Hali”.
With 4:27 remaining in the first quarter, Haliburton enjoyed a moment that mattered to him: his first break. “I was tired as hell,” Haliburton said with a laugh after the game. “But even through that, I just kept feeling like, ‘Man, I’m playing again.'”
On Indiana’s first possession, an eager Haliburton fired a no-look pass intended for Andrew Nembhard that sailed out of bounds. On the next possession, he ran a 2-on-1 with Pascal Siakam and finished with a crossover into a 15-foot jumper, his first basket in more than a year. The adrenaline carried him through the night.
“I have my own internal expectations,” Haliburton said. “But our goal is to win a championship. That has never wavered.”
A season of questions
The Pacers’ season, and Indiana’s road back to contention, depends on those expectations. The last time Haliburton was healthy, he delivered one of the greatest clutch postseason runs in NBA history, hitting a game-tying or game-winning shot in each of the four rounds of the 2025 playoffs.
Indiana led in the first quarter of Game 7 in Oklahoma City before Haliburton tore his Achilles, and the Thunder went on to claim the championship. While Haliburton spent the 2025-26 season recovering, the Pacers won just 19 games.
That record makes Indiana one of the most perplexing teams heading into the 2026-27 season. Despite reaching the conference finals in 2024 and again in 2025, the Pacers are projected to win a modest 42 games and rank 10th in the Eastern Conference, according to the Basketball Power Index.
“I don’t look too much into it,” Haliburton said. “Our whole team can relate to that. We’ve all felt that way one way or another.”
The Pacers are the last team to have beaten the champion New York Knicks in a playoff series. In a more competitive East than the one he left, Haliburton is determined to prove that Indiana can reclaim its place at the top.
“Finding that magic again, that’s no guarantee,” Pacers general manager Chad Buchanan said. “But our core guys believe in each other. They feel like people have written them off already. That’s what’s happened those two years we made runs — people just kind of discarded us. That’s what fuels them.”
Giving back in Indianapolis
The zero in the middle of the jersey was orange, matching the trim on a shirt that had been shaded blue. As Haliburton picked up the sheet of paper, he scoffed. “Who drew this one?” he asked. “Orange and blue on a Pacers jersey?”
“Knicks colours,” his wife, Jade, said with a knowing smile.
With training camp still a few weeks away, the Haliburtons visited children at the Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis. Haliburton was there as a spokesperson for the Indiana Donor Network, raising awareness of organ donation. The five children in attendance had all received kidney transplants.
Sitting around a table, Haliburton and the children, some as young as 6, gathered sheets of paper to colour. A raucous debate quickly broke out. “What’s your favorite color?” Haliburton asked his tablemates, launching an animated discussion. “Red!” one child said. “Blue!” said another. “Yellow!”
“Rainbow!” another said, prompting a debate over whether all the colours could count as one. He insisted they could. “But is there a rainbow marker?” Haliburton asked, presenting the question as a colour-based checkmate. When Haliburton said his favourite colour was grey, the children recoiled. “You never hear that, huh?” he said with a smile.
Haliburton spent much of the past year in Indianapolis, throwing himself into projects like these. He helped the Pacers revitalise their charity softball game earlier this summer, featuring players from the Indianapolis Colts and Indiana Fever. Fans packed Victory Field, a 12,000-seat Triple-A baseball stadium in downtown Indianapolis.
His connection to the Midwest runs deep. He was born in Wisconsin, and he met and eventually proposed to his wife in Ames. His bond with the region has only deepened since the Pacers acquired him in a trade in 2022. “It’s a different perspective on life now,” Haliburton said. “I’m just thankful to be playing basketball again and to be doing all the different things that I can do in the community because when something like that happens, it’s like your life flashes before your eyes.”
The long road back
During his first vacation a few months after surgery, he could barely walk down the stairs of a rented house and needed help getting around when they left. His surgeon had warned him, but the reality still hit hard. He wept in the shower.
“Just having to come to terms with going from being on top of the world to the complete opposite of that in an instance,” Haliburton said.
“It’s such a crazy thing to say because it’s a basketball injury that no matter what … there’s a time put on it. You know you’re going to be good in that amount of time. We have the best doctors in the world, the best therapists, all those things. You know you’re going to be good, but it’s a scary thing.”
He spent most of his recovery in Indianapolis, finding a seat on the bench for games at home and on the road, even as the season slipped away. Midway through his rehabilitation, he also developed a severe case of shingles, gaining 30 pounds and suffering heavy face swelling as a side effect of the medication. The highly contagious illness kept him away from his teammates on the sideline. It was another blow in a long season.
“In the league, especially when a star player like that is injured, what that means for the next year, sometimes they’re on their own little schedule, ‘Hey, I just got to do what’s right for me,'” Buchanan said. “That’s not how Ty’s wired. Ty is wired to know what does the team need from me, rather than what I need to do for the team.”
During his lonely, arduous recovery, Haliburton would occasionally watch some of his old highlights. “Just to feel something,” he said. “I once could do that. I miss that feeling.”
He even rewatched the 2025 Finals. His focus remained on Game 4. The Pacers led the series 2-1, but the Thunder rallied from double-digit deficits in the second half, with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scoring 15 of his 35 points in the final 4:38. “Game 4 will forever live in my brain,” Haliburton said. “You win that game, the whole series changes.”
As he watched his team endure the worst season in franchise history, Haliburton realised how much of the conversation around the Pacers’ struggles centred on him, his injury, his recovery and his eventual return. “Everybody always feels the summer is really long,” he said. “Well, I’ve had that for double, triple the amount of time everybody else.”
Rebuilding the standards
Haliburton does not want the Pacers to forget last season. Indiana finished with its fewest wins in franchise history. Injuries decimated the roster early, and the team began positioning itself for a better draft pick by the second half. By season’s end, it looked like a shell of the side that reached the Finals.
“You can take [our preseason rankings] as disrespect, but at the same time, you got to understand we put ourselves in that position by the way we played last year,” Haliburton said. “There’s standards that we didn’t meet that we got to get back to. And there’s no secret that there was a drop-off last year.”
Training camp has focused on rebuilding those habits. The night before the first practice, the team gathered at Buchanan’s house, on the floor of his indoor basketball court. It has become an annual tradition over the past four years, a chance for the Pacers to set their priorities for the season.
Coach Rick Carlisle lamented how long the summer had been. It had been five and a half months since the Pacers’ last game in April, and even longer since they had played a game with anything on the line. “Reclaim” became the key word of the meeting.
Carlisle acknowledged how important Haliburton’s return was but cautioned against viewing him as a saviour. “We’re a team that’s very reliant on one another,” Carlisle said before the game in Ames. “One of the things that when we had a really, really good two-year run, it made us a special team, our connectivity, our ecosystem, dependence on one another. We’re always going to be better as the sum of all the parts.”
Most of the core remains the same: Haliburton, Siakam, Nembhard and Aaron Nesmith. Ivica Zubac, however, was brought in to replace the departed Myles Turner in a trade-deadline deal that cost Indiana the No. 5 pick in the draft. Team sources say the Pacers are confident the move will help reopen their championship window. They also acknowledge that Zubac, who plays closer to the basket, offers different strengths from Turner, a centre who stretches the floor from three-point range.
“We have a great coach who figures things out,” Buchanan said. “That’s a strength of his. If things aren’t going well, and we aren’t playing well — or [Zubac’s] not fitting well, he adapts.”
The fit with Zubac could take time, as could his chemistry with Haliburton. The pair has struggled with timing in pick-and-roll sets early in the preseason, with Haliburton often rounding the corner before his new centre has a chance to roll. “He’s so anxious to prove to people. He hates that people say he’ll have to be patient. He hates that,” Buchanan said. “He’s like, ‘I’ve been out 16 effing months. I’m ready to play.’ He’s obviously very confident, but I still think there’s going to be a ramp-up for him as just getting his feet, groove and rhythm back.”
Flashes of the old form
Haliburton moved like his former self at times, but the growing pains were evident in his first game back. He compared himself to a rookie, playing too fast and needing to slow down to let the offence find its rhythm. He tweaked his right ankle during the game and sat out the next preseason contest, but an MRI confirmed that his Achilles was unaffected.
“I was hyped to be out there, excited, but I just got to slow down a little bit,” he said. “There’s a ton of improvement to be made on my end and on our team’s end. But I’m just excited to be back on the floor.”
Several moments in the gym this summer gave him reason for confidence. One afternoon in late July, 13 months after his surgery, he took one dribble and tossed the ball toward the basket. As he raced after it, the ball bounced just short of the rim inside the Pacers’ practice facility. Its upward trajectory almost carried him higher toward the hoop than he had been in years. Midair, he crossed the ball between his legs and rose to dunk it with his right hand as members of the Pacers’ staff let out a collective scream.
It was Haliburton who screamed loudest, releasing more than a year of pent-up frustration. He had a running bet with Erik Huddleston, Indiana’s strength and conditioning coach, that if he completed the dunk, he could skip his post-practice workout. It was a dunk he had not regularly made since he was a 20-year-old rookie. Later, he posted a video of the dunk on his social media accounts, and the message to the rest of the league was obvious.
The dunk signalled Haliburton’s flashy arrival, but a quieter moment a month later sent an even louder signal. Before the season began, the Pacers held a minicamp in Los Angeles. At one point during a scrimmage, Haliburton fell to the floor. A few months earlier, everyone in the gym would have gone silent, waiting for him to get back to his feet, much as had happened that night in Oklahoma City.
This time, nothing happened. He got up, and the game continued.
“That,” he said, “makes me feel normal again.”