Tyrese Haliburton returned to the court on 7 October, playing 16 minutes in the Indiana Pacers’ 123-112 preseason win over the Minnesota Timberwolves. He finished with seven points and six assists in his first game since tearing his right Achilles in Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals.
The sweat from Haliburton’s Pacers jersey almost immediately began to seep into his blue warm-up shirt. For 16 months, the two-time All-Star guard had waited patiently, then less patiently, and then practically champed at the bit to leave his seat on the sideline and play minutes in an NBA game.
The game was played in Ames, Iowa, at Iowa State University, his 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 Haliburton’s face above the nickname “Cyclone Hali”.
With 4:27 remaining in the first quarter, Haliburton relished a different moment: his first break. On Indiana’s first possession, an antsy Haliburton fired a no-look pass, intended for Andrew Nembhard, out of bounds. On the next trip, he ran a 2-on-1 with Pascal Siakam and finished with a crossover into a 15-foot jumper for his first basket in more than a year.
“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.'”
The adrenaline carried him through 16 minutes of action. Haliburton finished with seven points and six assists as the Pacers won 123-112.
“I have my own internal expectations,” Haliburton said. “But our goal is to win a championship. That has never wavered.”
A road back to contention
The Pacers’ season, and Indiana’s road back to contention, depends on how much Haliburton can recapture of his old form. The last time he was healthy, he produced one of the greatest clutch postseason runs in NBA history, with 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 title. While Haliburton spent the 2025-26 season recovering, the Pacers won just 19 games.
That 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 ESPN’s 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 beat the champion New York Knicks in a playoff series. But 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.”
Life beyond the court
The zero in the middle of the jersey was orange, matching the trim on a jersey shaded with blue in the middle. 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 six, gathered sheets of paper to colour. A raucous debate quickly ensued.
“What’s your favourite colour?” 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 be considered one colour. He insisted they could.
“But is there a rainbow marker?” Haliburton asked, presenting the question as a checkmate of sorts. When he suggested his favourite colour was grey, the children recoiled. “You never hear that, huh?” he said with a smile.
Haliburton has spent much of the past year in Indianapolis, throwing himself into projects like these. He helped the Pacers revive their charity softball game earlier this summer, featuring players from the Indianapolis Colts and the 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 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.”
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 set in. 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 spot on the bench for home and road games even as the season slid. Midway through his rehab, he also contracted a bad case of shingles, gaining 30 pounds and suffering severe facial swelling as a side effect of the heavy medication. The illness, which is highly contagious, kept him away from his teammates on the sidelines. 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, he would occasionally replay some of his old highlights.
“Just to feel something,” he said. “I once could do that. I miss that feeling.”
At one point, 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.”
The thought stayed with him as he watched his team endure the worst season in franchise history, realising how much of the conversation about the Pacers’ struggles centred on him, his injury, his recovery and his eventual return.
“Everybody always feels the summer is really long,” Haliburton said. “Well, I’ve had that for double, triple the amount of time everybody else.”
Rebuilding the habits
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 the 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 day of 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 iron out their priorities before the season.
Coach Rick Carlisle lamented how long the summer had been. It had been 5½ months since their last game in April, and even longer since their last game with anything on the line. “Reclaim” became the key word of the meeting.
Carlisle acknowledged how important it was to have Haliburton back, 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. But Ivica Zubac arrived to replace the departed Myles Turner in a trade-deadline deal that ended up costing Indiana the No. 5 pick in the draft.
Team sources say the Pacers are confident the deal 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, and so could his chemistry with Haliburton. The pair has struggled with their 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.”
Signs of the old Haliburton
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 so the offence could find its rhythm. He tweaked his right ankle during the game and sat out the next preseason game, 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 into the air toward the basket. As he chased it, the ball bounced just short of the rim inside the Pacers’ practice facility, and its upward trajectory almost carried him higher toward the hoop than he has been in years. Mid-air, 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 the loudest, releasing more than a year of pent-up frustration. He had a running bet with Erik Huddleston, Indiana’s strength and conditioning coach: 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, Haliburton 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 start of the season, Pacers players held a minicamp in Los Angeles. During one 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, just as they had that night in Oklahoma City.
This time, nothing happened. He got up, and the game continued.
“That,” he said, “makes me feel normal again.”