Is Haliburton’s impact on winning as marginal as some people think? Or do his naysayers just not understand how the Pacers star is leading the franchise – especially in the NBA playoffs?
Tyrese Haliburton has been the subject of a great deal of scrutiny over the course of his NBA career.
On one hand, he just led the Indiana Pacers to an improbable second-round victory over the top-seeded Cleveland Cavaliers in five games for their second straight Eastern Conference finals appearance.
On the other, the fifth-year guard is prone to stinkers like the one we saw in Game 3 when he totaled four points on 2-of-8 shooting in 30 minutes.
Haliburton’s highs and lows have turned him into a polarizing figure in the NBA world. Some people have thrown around the term “overrated,” while others refer to him as one of the most desirable teammates in the sport.
Hali fkn hooping!!!! Where the lames who said he was overrated??!! Quiet as hell. That boy NICE and even more someone everyone would love to play with! @mindthegamepod
— LeBron James (@KingJames) May 14, 2025So, what’s the deal with Haliburton?
Is his impact on winning as marginal as some people think? Or do his naysayers just not understand the winning plays Haliburton is consistently making?
A Little Like Chauncey Billups
A recent revelation I’ve had is how similar Haliburton’s career is to Chauncey Billips, the Portland Trail Blazers coach who played in 17 NBA seasons. Not so much in terms of style (Billups was more of a physical and methodical point guard than the up-tempo speedster Haliburton), but rather in how his true value is hard to measure with traditional box-score stats.
Billups serves as the ultimate case study for why field-goal percentage is a poor measure of efficiency. In 2005-06, Billups had a field-goal percentage of 41.8% – good for 97th among 111 eligible players.
However, field-goal percentage fails to account for free throws and the extra point added by hitting 3-pointers. Billups was great at drawing fouls (9.8 attempts per 100 possessions in 2005-06) and a 3-point marksman (43.3%), so he was always going to be misunderstood by that stat.
But when you look at his true shooting percentage (which accounts for all types of shots – 2s, 3s and free throws), his 60.2% was the seventh-best mark in the league.
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A similar disconnect is taking place with Haliburton. If you take a quick glance, you’ll see that Haliburton finished 41st in the league (among qualifiers) with 18.6 points per game. How on Earth could someone who is supposed to be the best player on the sixth-best offensive team in the league and a conference finalist rank so low?
Short answer: There is more to basketball than just scoring points! Long answer: Those aren’t the stats that do justice to Haliburton’s on-court impact.
Haliburton quarterbacks the elite offense not through volume scoring, but instead with his decision-making and ability to play with pace. He led all NBA guards in the 2024-25 regular season with 5.61 assists per turnover and was tied for fourth with 31 double-doubles.
As we learned from the Seven-Seconds-or-Less Phoenix Suns, the best shots are generated early in the shot clock before the defense can get fully set. Haliburton is a staunch observer of this practice, constantly generating great looks for himself and his teammates before the defense has time to get comfortable.
Even off a make, Haliburton has the presence of mind to scan the floor and look for cracks in the defenses’ shell. Hit-ahead passes like the one below are littered throughout his highlight tape.
Haliburton only gets credited with an assist on the play, but he’s the sole reason that shot is available. Most players would dwell on the basket their team just surrendered and leisurely dribble the ball up the floor. But not Haliburton.
He immediately turns the page and focuses and getting those points back. It’s because of Haliburton’s hastiness and court mapping that layups like that are available to his teammates.
So how do we quantify features like that? Haliburton was second in the NBA in touches this season (per NBA.com). That means he has a great deal of control over what’s happening on offense. So we can look at the team’s offensive rating with and without him on the floor.
When Haliburton was on the floor, the Pacers offense had a 116.8 offensive rating (points per 100 possessions), but without him that number fell to 109.7. For reference, that is a similar shift we see with All-Stars like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (120.7/110.6) of the Oklahoma City Thunder and Giannis Antetounkmpo (117.6/108.0) of the Milwaukee Bucks.
Another way we can put numbers to all the things that Haliburton does that are hard to identify with traditional box score stats is DRIP, which projects a player’s contribution to a team’s plus/minus per 100 possessions.
As it stands, Haliburton is tied for the sixth-highest DRIP in the league (4.3) and has the sixth-best O-DRIP (the offensive version of the stat). Like Billups, Haliburton looks a lot more like an All-NBA player when you dig a little deeper into the data.
A Lot Like the Early 2000s Pistons
When you really think about it, Haliburton’s Pacers are kind of like Billups’ Detroit Pistons from the early/mid-aughts (which is funny because their current head coach, Rick Carlisle, both coached for and against that bunch for a number of years).
Along with being led by guards whose value is often misinterpreted by conventional measures, both squads are incredibly balanced.
During the Game 3 broadcast of the Pacers-Cavs series, ESPN analyst Doris Burke mentioned a quote from Myles Turner. Haliburton’s teammate said, “As a team, we have elite role clarity.”
Not only do Haliburton, Turner, Andrew Nembhard, Pascal Siakam and Aaron Nesmith (and the rest of the gang) complement each other really well, but they also have complete understanding of what they need to do to keep the machine running smoothly.
In this way, the Pacers are similar to that lineup of Billups, Richard Hamilton, Tyshaun Prince, Rasheed Wallace and Ben Wallace for the Detroit team that many people credit with being the epitome of playing starless, team basketball.
Of course, the Pistons were a perennial conference finals attendee, even winning the NBA title in 2004. The Pacers are starting to walk in that same path with their two straight appearances, but can they add their own title and increase the similarities of this comparison?
We’ll soon find out.
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Overrated or Misunderstood: What’s the Deal With Tyrese Haliburton? Opta Analyst.
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