INDIANAPOLIS — You can be incredibly industrious and still get lucky as hell.
The NBA put eleventy billion dollars into incessantly hyping the In-Season Tournament (IST) as not just Must See TV, but You Hate Goldfish and Your Mom if You Don’t Agree This is Nirvana in November TV. It has hyped this thing within a half-inch of its life. But the IST, so far, has worked out as well as anyone on Fifth Avenue could have hoped — garnering near-universal buy-in from hardcore fans, usually skeptical media and the vast majority of players.
But the league didn’t have anything to do with how the group-play round worked out. At the end of the preliminary stage, there were, as scheduled, eight teams headed to the quarterfinals — but no Steph, no Joker, no Embiid and neither of the top two teams in the actual Western Conference standings, the Minnesota Timberwolves and Oklahoma City Thunder, or the East’s current No. 2 seed, the Orlando Magic.
But there was a hidden prize, like the toy at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box: a hell of a lot of Tyrese Haliburton on Monday. And that may be the best development of all for this tournament going forward.
The NBA always wants its teams in the biggest markets to shine, for obvious business reasons. But it needs good, competitive, winning teams in the Indianas and Milwaukees and Sacramentos of the league — each of which made the IST knockout rounds — as well. It has to give people in the Midwest a reason to don their coats on cold winter nights and pay for tickets and parking and food and booze, just as it has to fight the perfect weather in Los Angeles and Miami to get people to pay good money to come inside. And the whole country got to see the Indiana Pacers’ All-Star terror damn near his peak on Monday, even as he ground through the remnants of an upper respiratory infection.
The 23-year-old guard cooked the 17-time NBA champion Boston Celtics on Monday night, sending the Pacers to Las Vegas and the IST semifinals in a 122-112 win. He picked a great time for his first career triple-double: 26 points, 10 rebounds and 13 assists. He scored or assisted on Indy’s first 20 points in the third quarter, and he punched the Pacers’ ticket to T-Mobile Arena on Thursday with a crazy-except-for-guys-like-him-four-point play with 1:33 left, breaking a 105-all tie.
“You don’t play on national TV if you don’t win games,” Haliburton said afterward. “The more we come out here and prove that, on a night-to-night basis, that we can win games, it’s gonna change. And that’s all that we’re about right now; changing how this organization is viewed and how we are as players viewed, and just coming out here and competing every night.”
It made Gainbridge Fieldhouse delirious — including the two teenage kids screaming, “Shoot it!” in my ear in the closing seconds, as the Pacers’ Buddy Hield considered, took and made a meaningless 3-pointer at the buzzer. Surely, these two brats had put money on some sort of parlay or prop bet or something and were thrilled to have cashed in at the last second. They insisted, though, that wasn’t the case.
“We’re just so happy!” one of them screamed.
“I haven’t seen that kind of energy in this place in the last three, four years,” Indiana’s Myles Turner said afterward.
And, before the comments are filled with, “Real ballers been knowing about Tyrese for years,” chill out, Supposed NBA Expert. This wasn’t about the hardcore hoop head who surfs League Pass or “CrunchTime” every night and knows every roster backward and forward or knows that Haliburton has been flirting with joining the 50/40/90 shooting club all season.
This is about the casual fan who normally would watch whatever NFL game was on “Monday Night Football” but who may have heard about the IST, oh, a thousand times in the last month and tuned in to TNT Monday to see what the deal was with these crazy courts. (The Pacers redid the IST floor at Gainbridge after players slipped on the new surface in Indiana’s first group-play game, Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said pregame. “They sent the court out and had the court totally refinished, and in the last game against Detroit, the court was perfect.”)
This was Indiana’s first national TV appearance this season. (Just as the case was last year, Indiana has just one non-IST national TV game scheduled this season. It’s on Jan. 30 … in Boston.) But the networks better make damn sure Haliburton gets more love on the regular. They didn’t have Damian Lillard and the Trail Blazers on every week during Dame Time’s decade-plus in Portland, but they had them on enough over the years to showcase Lillard’s excellence. The same should go for Haliburton.
He can score with anyone in the game, even though he doesn’t pat the ball or play with it or otherwise engage with histrionics. He gets to his spot with one or two dribbles, rises up and splashes or blows by for floaters and hooks and a bunch of other shots in his bag. He switches hands effortlessly. But he also rewarded Turner multiple times on Monday, after the big man did work getting deep post position. Indiana had seven players in double figures.
“When you have balanced scoring, I think it’s just basketball math, basketball science, whatever you want to call it — guys compete harder on defense,” Turner said. “When we all feel involved, and we all (do) — this guy leads the league in assists — the more and more he gets guys involved, and whatnot, it makes you, (it’s) human nature — it makes you want to compete hard at the other end of the floor.”
But, wait: That was Haliburton’s first career triple-double? Really?
“He doesn’t rebound,” deadpanned teammate T.J. McConnell. “I have more triple-doubles than him!”
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INDIANAPOLIS — You can be incredibly industrious and still get lucky as hell.
The NBA put eleventy billion dollars into incessantly hyping the In-Season Tournament (IST) as not just Must See TV, but You Hate Goldfish and Your Mom if You Don’t Agree This is Nirvana in November TV. It has hyped this thing within a half-inch of its life. But the IST, so far, has worked out as well as anyone on Fifth Avenue could have hoped — garnering near-universal buy-in from hardcore fans, usually skeptical media and the vast majority of players.
But the league didn’t have anything to do with how the group-play round worked out. At the end of the preliminary stage, there were, as scheduled, eight teams headed to the quarterfinals — but no Steph, no Joker, no Embiid and neither of the top two teams in the actual Western Conference standings, the Minnesota Timberwolves and Oklahoma City Thunder, or the East’s current No. 2 seed, the Orlando Magic.
But there was a hidden prize, like the toy at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box: a hell of a lot of Tyrese Haliburton on Monday. And that may be the best development of all for this tournament going forward.
The NBA always wants its teams in the biggest markets to shine, for obvious business reasons. But it needs good, competitive, winning teams in the Indianas and Milwaukees and Sacramentos of the league — each of which made the IST knockout rounds — as well. It has to give people in the Midwest a reason to don their coats on cold winter nights and pay for tickets and parking and food and booze, just as it has to fight the perfect weather in Los Angeles and Miami to get people to pay good money to come inside. And the whole country got to see the Indiana Pacers’ All-Star terror damn near his peak on Monday, even as he ground through the remnants of an upper respiratory infection.
The 23-year-old guard cooked the 17-time NBA champion Boston Celtics on Monday night, sending the Pacers to Las Vegas and the IST semifinals in a 122-112 win. He picked a great time for his first career triple-double: 26 points, 10 rebounds and 13 assists. He scored or assisted on Indy’s first 20 points in the third quarter, and he punched the Pacers’ ticket to T-Mobile Arena on Thursday with a crazy-except-for-guys-like-him-four-point play with 1:33 left, breaking a 105-all tie.
“You don’t play on national TV if you don’t win games,” Haliburton said afterward. “The more we come out here and prove that, on a night-to-night basis, that we can win games, it’s gonna change. And that’s all that we’re about right now; changing how this organization is viewed and how we are as players viewed, and just coming out here and competing every night.”
It made Gainbridge Fieldhouse delirious — including the two teenage kids screaming, “Shoot it!” in my ear in the closing seconds, as the Pacers’ Buddy Hield considered, took and made a meaningless 3-pointer at the buzzer. Surely, these two brats had put money on some sort of parlay or prop bet or something and were thrilled to have cashed in at the last second. They insisted, though, that wasn’t the case.
“We’re just so happy!” one of them screamed.
“I haven’t seen that kind of energy in this place in the last three, four years,” Indiana’s Myles Turner said afterward.
And, before the comments are filled with, “Real ballers been knowing about Tyrese for years,” chill out, Supposed NBA Expert. This wasn’t about the hardcore hoop head who surfs League Pass or “CrunchTime” every night and knows every roster backward and forward or knows that Haliburton has been flirting with joining the 50/40/90 shooting club all season.
This is about the casual fan who normally would watch whatever NFL game was on “Monday Night Football” but who may have heard about the IST, oh, a thousand times in the last month and tuned in to TNT Monday to see what the deal was with these crazy courts. (The Pacers redid the IST floor at Gainbridge after players slipped on the new surface in Indiana’s first group-play game, Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said pregame. “They sent the court out and had the court totally refinished, and in the last game against Detroit, the court was perfect.”)
This was Indiana’s first national TV appearance this season. (Just as the case was last year, Indiana has just one non-IST national TV game scheduled this season. It’s on Jan. 30 … in Boston.) But the networks better make damn sure Haliburton gets more love on the regular. They didn’t have Damian Lillard and the Trail Blazers on every week during Dame Time’s decade-plus in Portland, but they had them on enough over the years to showcase Lillard’s excellence. The same should go for Haliburton.
He can score with anyone in the game, even though he doesn’t pat the ball or play with it or otherwise engage with histrionics. He gets to his spot with one or two dribbles, rises up and splashes or blows by for floaters and hooks and a bunch of other shots in his bag. He switches hands effortlessly. But he also rewarded Turner multiple times on Monday, after the big man did work getting deep post position. Indiana had seven players in double figures.
“When you have balanced scoring, I think it’s just basketball math, basketball science, whatever you want to call it — guys compete harder on defense,” Turner said. “When we all feel involved, and we all (do) — this guy leads the league in assists — the more and more he gets guys involved, and whatnot, it makes you, (it’s) human nature — it makes you want to compete hard at the other end of the floor.”
But, wait: That was Haliburton’s first career triple-double? Really?
“He doesn’t rebound,” deadpanned teammate T.J. McConnell. “I have more triple-doubles than him!”
And he’s right.