OKLAHOMA CITY — The Indiana Pacers were never even supposed to reach the NBA Finals. That’s how the vast majority of prognosticators and fans saw it.
That spot atop the Eastern Conference was supposed to belong to the defending champs in Boston or the Cleveland Cavaliers squad that won 64 games in the regular season. But by the time Game 1 had ended, when Tyrese Haliburton silenced the Oklahoma City Thunder’s “Loud City” crowd with a midrange game-winner from the right side with 0.3 seconds left, there was suddenly hope that they might be able to win the whole thing.
It was there for all to see in the hallways of Paycom Center after the game.
As the Pacers celebrated en route to their locker room, their longtime president of basketball operations, Kevin Pritchard, spotted ESPN analyst and former Golden State Warriors general manager Bob Myers amid the mass of people.
“Y’all had it f—ing figured out at halftime!” he hollered at Myers, who had said during halftime that the Pacers had no chance of winning the title if their sloppy play to start the series was any indication.
“You had 19 turnovers!” he shouted back at Pritchard with a smile.
They had somehow survived in the opener — largely because they had just four turnovers in the second half. It was yet another reminder of how incredibly far the Pacers had come from a 10-15 start to their season, a journey that would take them all the way to Game 7, against a Thunder team that was a prohibitive favorite to win the title.
And then, basketball proved how cruel it can be. Indiana’s season ended Sunday with Oklahoma City’s 103-91 win, made much harder to stomach after a sickening injury to star guard Tyrese Haliburton. A team so close to a title now has little idea of what awaits it next year.
After getting off to a great start with three 3-pointers in the first quarter of Game 7 Sunday, Haliburton tried to blow by a recovering Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to get to the rim. Except his right lower leg remained planted on the court. He went down in a heap after losing the ball, and as the play continued at the other end of the court, he pounded the floor at Paycom Center in frustration. Haliburton was carried off the court, his and his team’s immediate future in doubt.
When the Pacers left the floor after their Cinderella season was over, they were greeted by Haliburton at the door of the visitors’ locker room. He stood there on crutches, with the hood of his Pacers sweatshirt pulled over his head and a towel around his neck, sharing his appreciation as they did the same in return.
Tyrese Haliburton made sure to show love to his teammates in the hallway after the game 🥺 pic.twitter.com/d6hIqoDWuK
— DraftKings (@DraftKings) June 23, 2025
“What happened with Tyrese is, all of our hearts dropped,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said. “He authored one of the great individual playoff runs in the history of the NBA, with dramatic play after dramatic play. It was just something that no one’s ever seen. And did it as one of 17 (players). That’s the beautiful thing about him.”
James Johnson, the Pacers’ veteran forward who rarely plays but is the team’s resident protector, helped carry Haliburton off the floor.
“That was heartbreaking,” he said. “I know how hard he works, how bad he wanted it, and I know the hours he puts in, day in and day out. … Just to even be here was an honor, to sit courtside and help cheer on these guys was an honor, man. There’s a group character that’s hard to find. KP (Pritchard) and (Pacers general manager) Chad (Buchanan) did a great job of putting this group together, and getting high-character guys.”
That the Pacers lost the title to Oklahoma City on Sunday almost felt secondary when compared to the injury to their franchise player. Haliburton suffered an Achilles tendon injury, according to his father, John, as relayed by the ESPN broadcast. The injury is to the same leg he’d suffered a strained calf muscle just a few days earlier. Assuming that’s correct, Tyrese would likely miss all of the 2025-26 season.
It threw what had been a brilliantly executed piece of short- and long-term roster construction into chaos.
Haliburton, the player who management and Carlisle had believed could be the centerpiece of a contender when they acquired him at the trade deadline in 2022, is Indiana’s lodestar. The cost of getting him was center Domantas Sabonis, a two-time All-Star with the Pacers and a popular player among fans. But Haliburton had a quality as a playmaker and scorer that intrigued the Pacers. Indiana didn’t hesitate to give him a five-year, $260 million deal in 2023.
The injury made what Haliburton said late in the regular season about the fleeting nature of contending in the league all the more poignant.
“I think we’re just trying to hold onto that (core group) as long as we can,” Haliburton said. “Because you see a lot of teams in the NBA, especially with the cap room and all that, the new CBA and all that stuff, the odds of us keeping this group together forever aren’t very high. We know guys have to get paid and all that. So we’re just cherishing the moment while we can, and trying to keep our core together as long as we can, and trying to do special things.”
But how can the Pacers overcome this? In the short term, it seems impossible.
The Pacers had been set up for a two- or three-year window with their core group, while many of their potential opponents in the East faced either significant injuries to key players or, in the case of the New York Knicks, the fallout from players after firing a popular coach. Haliburton, Pascal Siakam, Andrew Nembhard, sixth-man extraordinaire T.J. McConnell and reserve forward Obi Toppin are all signed through the 2027-28 season. (McConnell has a partial guarantee of $5 million in the final year of his deal.) Forward Aaron Nesmith is signed through 2027.
Bennedict Mathurin, another contributor off the bench, and fourth-year forward Isaiah Jackson, who missed most of this season after his own Achilles tear, will be restricted free agents this summer. Mathurin had some big moments in the postseason, so he potentially could have some suitors.
But there’s no replacing Haliburton’s rare abilities and face-of-the-franchise qualities, even as Indiana’s front office, led by Pritchard and Buchanan, built a championship-level franchise around him — despite never having a top-five pick.
Nembhard was a 2022 second-round pick, a pick Indiana acquired from Cleveland, the day before the Pacers got Haliburton from Sacramento, in a trade for Caris LeVert. The Pacers got Siakam from Toronto, in part, by not letting one of their few mistakes linger; they traded Bruce Brown — a high-profile free agent signing for them in 2023 (two years, $45 million) — in the package for Siakam, after Brown played just half a season in Indiana.
The Pacers are also a mid-market franchise. Brown aside, they know that most free agents don’t flock to Indianapolis to set up shop. Yet Indiana has refused to tank over the years — decades — as it fielded mostly good but rarely great teams.
The challenge now, in the wake of both Haliburton’s injury and a two-year run where Indiana has been a final four and final two franchise, is to see if this is sustainable, with or without the team’s superstar. Indiana has traditionally stayed shy of the luxury-tax line over the years; per Spotrac, the Pacers haven’t paid the tax since 2005, when they paid $4.67 million.
But to re-sign free agent veteran center Myles Turner, who’s become one of the team’s key mainstays, Indiana will almost certainly have to be a taxpayer next season. The 29-year-old Turner is the top center available this summer in free agency, but the expectation from all concerned is that Indiana will be willing to pay the $30 million or so annually to keep him, even if it pushes Indiana into the first apron of the tax.
Turner struggled mightily in these finals, averaging just 10.6 points (37.7 percent overall, 21.7 from 3), 4.4 rebounds and 1.4 blocks, but he shared his fond memories of their unexpected run afterward.
“It was special,” he said. “Just everything we’ve been through to get to this point, everything that went into it … a journey at that. We talk about the process a lot, not necessarily the end goal, but the process. I’m going to miss the process of this group.”
Unfortunately, like the Celtics and Milwaukee Bucks — who also had star players (Jayson Tatum and Damian Lillard, respectively) go down during the postseason with Achilles injuries — Indiana may face a “gap season” of sorts in 2025-26 if Haliburton misses most or all of the season. But the Pacers have long been loath to tank in hopes of adding to their roster over the decades, and it’s hard to see them doing so next season, even if they have to play without their superstar.
“There’s nothing wrong with high expectations,” Carlisle, who is 10th among coaches in career postseason wins and 11th in regular-season victories, said during the season. “What you don’t want is a situation of apathy, where expectations are low and all you’re ever doing is selling hope. That’s not why I came here, that’s not why Kevin Pritchard is doing his job and that’s not what our ownership is about.”
Without Haliburton, the Pacers will have to be even more precise with their drafts and trades. They traded their 2025 first-rounder last week to the Pelicans to get their 2026 first-rounder back from New Orleans. That could potentially be back in play if Indiana wants to get back into the first round of this year’s draft.
Indiana could also, potentially, apply for an injured player exception that would allow the Pacers to sign a free agent for half of Haliburton’s $45.5 million salary for next season. Teams are awarded such exceptions if a league physician determines a player’s injury will force him to miss the remainder of a season. Indiana would have between July 1 and next Jan. 15 to apply for the exception.
Haliburton sat at his locker before Game 5 of Indiana’s second-round series against Cleveland. A television nearby was playing the Cleveland Guardians-Milwaukee Brewers game as a calm Haliburton discussed baseball with two Rocket Arena locker room attendants. The conversation turned to Cincinnati Reds sensation Elly de la Cruz, and one of the attendants informed Haliburton that the Reds would be in town later that week.
“We’re not coming back to Cleveland,” Haliburton said.
That bravado — hubris? — is a key part of the Haliburton brand. As such, it’s a key part of Indiana’s identity as well.
He capped an improbable 8-0 run in the final 40 seconds of Game 5 of Indiana’s first-round series against Milwaukee with a driving layup past Giannis Antetokounmpo, giving the Pacers a 119-118 win and a 4-1 series victory. In Game 2 of the Cavs series, when Haliburton grabbed an offensive rebound off his own missed free throw with 12.4 seconds left, and Indiana down two, he dribbled straight back behind the 3-point line and splashed a game-winning triple over Cleveland’s Ty Jerome for a 120-119 win.
Against the Knicks in Game 1 of the conference finals, Haliburton’s last-second jumper tied the game at the end of regulation, and Indiana won it in overtime. And in Game 1 of the finals, after an awful night shooting, Haliburton nonetheless hit that pull-up over Cason Wallace for a one-point Indiana victory.
It wasn’t happenstance or coincidence that Haliburton had the autonomy to freelance in such game-winning moments.
Carlisle, famously, has throttled back on the micromanaging that often defined his earlier head coaching jobs in Detroit and Indiana, after being on Larry Bird’s bench as his assistant during Bird’s three seasons as head coach. Carlisle’s championship run in Dallas had shown him he had to let his players make decisions in real time, in clutch moments, rather than trying to dictate from the bench.
That was a central tenet of these Pacers.
“We have a passion and a pride in this organization and what we’re building here,” Haliburton had said at the end of the regular season. “’Cause we feel like we built it. We feel like this is something that’s been very player-led. We feel like our front office and our coaching staff did a great job of giving us the tools, but they really allow us to experiment and be ourselves. So we take pride in this.”
After his team drubbed the Cavaliers in Game 4 of that series, shredding a 3-2 zone that flummoxed Indiana in Game 3, Carlisle sat in his office with a longtime friend from back home, fielding questions from a reporter about how he’d helped Haliburton realize who he is and who he’s becoming in the league.
Haliburton had to address not just the pressure of the playoffs, but the fallout from being the most common pick when his peers were asked who the most overrated player in the league is for The Athletic’s annual anonymous player poll. And after the Pacers closed out Milwaukee in Game 5, Antetokounmpo chastised Haliburton’s father, John, for getting into the Greek Freak’s face after the final buzzer sounded.
“One thing that you’ve got to understand about a young player who’s experiencing the limelight for the first time is that there’s certain things that he simply has to experience to learn about,” Carlisle said. “I try to give him clues as to what he should be thinking. I try to give him direction. But I also say to him, ‘Part of this is you’ve got to go through this. You’ve got to learn about it. And you’ve got to figure out your best way to deal with it — no matter what it is.’”
Haliburton showed his grit, coming back from a strained calf in Game 5 to provide heroic moments for the Pacers three nights later in Game 6.
Now, unfortunately, both Haliburton and the Pacers have much more pressing questions to face in the coming months, the basketball gods having ripped asunder in a few shattering moments what had taken years to so carefully construct.
(Top photo of Tyrese Haliburton: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)
