In just his fifth full season in the NBA and third with the Indiana Pacers, two-time All-Star guard Tyrese Haliburton has produced one of the most extraordinary clutch performances in playoff history.
The Pacers have played 17 games this postseason, including Thursday’s dramatic NBA Finals Game One win over the Oklahoma City Thunder, and Haliburton has hit game-winning or game-tying shots with under two seconds on the clock in four of them.
Haliburton won Thursday’s game with a 21-foot, two-point jump shot with the Pacers trailing by one and 0.3 seconds remaining.
Clearly, while the Pacers have a talented roster and reached the 50-win mark for the first time since the 2013-2014 season, they would not have found themselves in the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999-2000 â and only the second time in their history â without Haliburton.
But the Pacers star was not always a Pacer.
The Haliburton Story Starts in Oshkosh
Hailiburton, a native of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, came to Indiana thanks to a major trade in 2022 that CBS Sports has called “one of the decade’s most shocking moves.”
After two seasons at Iowa State, where he was named to the All-Big 12 team in his sophomore year even though his season was abbreviated by a wrist injury, Haliburton entered the 2020 NBA draft at age 19 and was selected 12th overall by the Sacramento Kings.
Haliburton became an immediate impact player in the NBA, finishing third in Rookie of the Year voting in the shortened, post-COVID 2020-2021 season, and being named to the NBA’s All-Rookie team.
Averaging 13 points per game in 30.1 minutes, he started 20 of the 58 games he played, shooting an impressive 47.2 percent from the field including 40.9 percent from three-point range. But at the trade deadline in the following season, the Kings made what can only be called a desperate gamble.
Perhaps feeling pressure to end a dismal 16-year string of seasons without a playoff appearance, at the time the longest non-playoff run not only in the NBA but in any of the four major American sports leagues, the Kings packaged their emerging young star with veterans Buddy Hield and Tristan Thompson and shipped them to the Pacers.
Stunning Haliburton Trade Turned Franchise Around
In return the Kings got the player they coveted, center Domantas Sabonis, along with Justin Holiday, Jeremy Lamb and a second-round draft pick. At the time, Sacramento lacked a dominant center, but with Halliburton, De’Aaron Fox and Richaun Holmes, seemed to have a surplus of point guards.
For Sacramento, the move was not completely pointless. With Sabonis, they finally snapped their playoff drought the following season, though they were knocked out in the first round by the Golden State Warriors, in a seven-game series. Sacramento then went back to non-playoff status, missing out in both 2023-2024 and this season.
For the Pacers, and for Haliburton, the trade could not have worked out better. After one losing season, Haliburton led Indiana all the way to the Eastern Conference Finals in 2024, though they were swept by the eventual champion Boston Celtics.
In 2025, with the Celtics taking an early exit in the conference semifinals, the Pacers got back to the conference finals, only the third time since they joined the NBA in 1976 that the team reached the conference finals in consecutive seasons.
Now, thanks in large part to the 25-year-old from Oshkosh, the former ABA team is in a position to win the first NBA title in franchise history.
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