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A murmur builds as Tyrese Haliburton walks through the lobby of the Bellagio on his way toward a waiting car by the front door. Tourists in line for gelato are the first to crane their heads, pointing and whispering to their friends about the 24-year-old Indiana Pacers star in the Starter jacket with red, white and blue sleeves (and, on the back, an embroidered eagle sitting atop the five Olympic rings). By the blown-glass Chihuly ceiling, more phones whip out as Kevin Durant walks by going the other direction, his hood up, before stopping Haliburton for a dap. Durant is a surefire Hall of Famer who was starring in the league when Haliburton was still in middle school. But this summer, they are peers, chasing a gold medal together in Paris for USA Basketball.
One hour later across the Strip at Paris, the casino and hotel, Haliburton is noticed again, taking a moment to himself just off the casino floor and eating a bag of Funyuns.
“Dude, you’re awesome!” says a young woman leaving a nearby elevator.
“You are, too!” Haliburton says.
The woman turns to a friend and says, “That’s Tyrese Haliburton!”
This is life for Haliburton, the 6-foot-5 breakout star of the past NBA season who, at only 24 years old, already has earned two All-Star appearances, a max contract worth in the neighborhood of $245 million, and a place this summer on perhaps the most acclaimed roster in international basketball history since the original 1992 Dream Team. If Team USA wins at the Olympics in Paris, it will cap a golden summer for a man who seems to be living out a childhood fantasy. A deep playoff run with the Pacers and his Olympics debut bookend another highlight: his appearance in June at WWE Smackdown in Madison Square Garden, a highlight for a lifelong wrestling diehard.
All of this is more than many will accomplish in an entire career, let alone their first four NBA seasons. But for Haliburton, there is yet another level of significance: his being here at all represents a remarkably unlikely outcome. Only 10 years ago, as a high school freshman, he was effectively cut from his local Wisconsin AAU team—for, as he tells it, not being good enough. Only six years ago, he arrived as an unheralded recruit to an unheralded college. Four years ago, he was a late lottery pick by the Sacramento Kings, who flipped him to the Pacers within two years.
So, yes, Haliburton is self-aware about, and grateful for, a basketball career that might never have left Wisconsin, let alone played out on a world stage. He does not take for granted making All-Star games, Olympic teams or Eastern Conference Finals.
“There’s a lot to be happy about,” he says. “I’m blessed, man.”
Yet spend enough time with Haliburton and something else becomes clear.
“I’m greedy, I want to be great,” he says. “So, I mean, what is there to be satisfied about?”
That duality has fueled the leap he has made over the last 10 years, and is driving what he hopes is his next. The kid who idolized both John Cena, wrestling’s nice guy, and The Rock, its heel, has grown up to be Midwest nice—but also a self-described “petty human being” who prefers playing on the road because of the chance to don the black hat. He is quick to laugh at himself when people point out his two, different voice inflections, but gets serious when remembering critiques of his game. His closet is filled with Doc Martens in every color and high-end watches like Cartier’s iconic Crash and Pebble, yet he wears a white, $15 Uniqlo T-shirt every day. Where the simplicity of his daily routine hasn’t changed since high school —video games, relaxing at home, basketball—he also is eager to take on increasingly weighty responsibilities for the Pacers. A 6-foot-5, 185-pound guard trying to take over a league dominated by big men, he looks like the picture of confidence—but describes a daily battle to maintain it. No one, not even Haliburton himself, could have predicted how his career would take off over the past decade. And yet, he says, “I got a lot more to prove.”
“I'm coming into this year, and whether it's the case or not, viewing it like everybody thinks my success in the first half of last season was a fluke, and I got to prove it again,” Haliburton says. “And that's just who I am and that's how I'm just cut that way. That's the fun part about it for me: it's just another chip on my shoulder, [added] to the thousands that are already there.”
The first chip was placed at age 14.
Haliburton was a high school freshman in Oshkosh, Wis., when he learned from his parents that the Playground Warriors, an AAU team he’d played on since middle school alongside Tyler Herro, the future Miami Heat guard, no longer felt he had a future with the program.
“They never said that I was cut, but my parents told me that it was essentially like, ‘He can come if he wants to,’” he says. “So, like—that, I think, was worse.”
The decision—and the fact that he learned about it from his parents, not from the club—still rankles him years later, so much so that the episode remains “probably the main motivation,” he says, for all that came after. “Because I don't ever want to get back to a place like that.”
He showed up for his first practice with Milwaukee-based Wisconsin United, a three-hour round-trip drive from home in Oshkosh, “pissed at the world,” with faded self-belief and a jump shot that began well below his waist, a remnant of a childhood where he lacked the strength to use textbook form. United’s coach, Bryan Johnikin, tried tinkering with his new guard’s unique shot angle by using his 3-year-old grandson as a defender. Johnikin asked the boy to hold out his hand while Haliburton shot. Haliburton’s release was so low that the preschooler blocked it.
“I left in tears because I was so embarrassed of what was going on,” Haliburton says.
Johnikin called his assistant, worried that he’d chased away a kid he’d meant to inspire.
“‘Shit, I might have lost our best player,’” Johnikin remembers saying. “Most kids would duck out. Most kids don’t want to have us pull out their weaknesses.”
Haliburton kept coming back.
As he and Johnikin rebuilt his self-belief and jump shot, Haliburton won a state championship, earned Gatorade’s state player of the year honors, and dropped 42 points as a senior to beat a team led by a future Wisconsin Mr. Basketball winner. While at a high-school graduation party for Tyler Herro, his old AAU teammate, Haliburton says his former Playground Warriors coach pulled him aside and “apologized for everything.” (That coach? Chris Herro, Tyler’s dad. “I love Chris Herro, I love the Herro family, and I mean honestly, I should be thanking him,” Haliburton says. “It's one of the greatest, like, best moments of my life, you know?”)
Haliburton kept collecting slights. He remembered being off most recruiters’ radars. He still has bookmarked tweets critical of him at Iowa State, even when NBA draftniks began projecting him as a lottery pick. When Sacramento traded him to Indiana in 2022, the feeling of not being valued by a club he thought would be his long-term home stung for months. Haliburton says he likes to prove himself right more than prove others wrong—but this is also the same player who admits, “I’m at my best when people are talking shit to me.”
Knicks fans were the latest to learn that. “There’s nothing like the Garden,” he says. And throughout New York and Indiana’s Eastern Conference semifinal in May, Haliburton felt one pocket of seats across from the Pacers’ bench was consistently on him the most. As he tells it, a pregame interaction set the tone for their series-clinching win:
“So, Game 7 came around, and I'm like, I gotta come up with something to get me going. Like I heard Tom Brady say that one time, like he would look for things to get him going, and Michael Jordan said the same thing—like, sometimes he would make things up. So there's a dude courtside, he's chirping to me in warmups … and then he was really talking crazy. And I wasn't going to say anything, I'm like, I'm gonna let this go. I'm gonna get him later. And then [Pacers teammate and karate black-belt] James Johnson walked over. And James obviously is the muscle of the NBA. And when James walked over, the dude got quiet. So I just went over there. I was like, 'Why are you quiet now? Like, are you scared of him?' And then that's kind of what got us going.
“From there I mean, I got hot, I got going and it was like, every bucket I'm looking at him just to keep the blood flowing and keep the juices flowing. And honestly, as a team, we just flowed off that.”
Haliburton scored 26 points, and Indiana shot the highest field-goal percentage in NBA playoff history. If his response toward Knicks fans during the game was a reaction in the moment, his sartorial choice afterward was premeditated: He wore a hoodie emblazoned with a photo of former Pacer great Reggie Miller’s infamous choke-sign gesture toward Knicks fans from 1994. Asked if he considers Pacers-Knicks a real rivalry, Haliburton says he considers it more a media-driven narrative based around the teams’ 90s history than current animus. But he also acknowledges that he respects that history, and revels in adding another chapter.
About one month after ousting the Knicks, Haliburton leaned into playing the villain role again by walking into the ring at a June WWE Friday Night SmackDown event inside Madison Square Garden wearing a “Tyrese 3:17” T-shirt, and faced down Knicks guard Jalen Brunson. Days earlier, Fanatics founder Michael Rubin had connected Haliburton with WWE president Nick Khan, who invited Haliburton to take part in a SmackDown segment. Haliburton, who is such a wrestling fan he remembers watching Backlash when he was 3 years old, instantly accepted. The day of the event, he and Brunson, who are basketball foes but real-life friends, realized their segments would be combined, and the two worked out their interaction together. It was all, it turns out, fun among friends. It also underscored the point that Haliburton will never turn down the opportunity to troll.
In Las Vegas, Haliburton’s phone pings with a news alert: Cena is retiring in 2025. Off the top of his head, Haliburton knows that the Royal Rumble will come to Indianapolis next February.
“I'm gonna try to get there if I can,” he says.
When the Team USA roster gathered in early July for its first meeting ahead of the Olympics, coach Steve Kerr looked around the Bellagio conference room and said he saw 12 future Hall of Famers. He wasn’t exaggerating. Haliburton and Anthony Edwards, the only holdovers from last year’s fourth-place FIBA World Cup team, will be joined by a veritable golden generation’s worth of superstars: one plausible starting lineup includes four MVPs.
Haliburton held his spot because his pure point instincts were singular on a team loaded with a staggering amount of talent but mostly combo guards. Haliburton might not start, but he is in effect reprising the role of set-up-man-to-the-stars that Jason Kidd, Chris Paul, Kyrie Irving and Damian Lillard manned on teams that earned gold at the last four Olympics.
“Tyrese is really a floor general,” Kerr said after the team’s second practice in Las Vegas.
The international rules and ball may be different, but history suggests that the long-tail effect of what happens in Paris will ripple through the NBA for years to come. Team USA duties have signaled stars in waiting (Jordan in ‘84, Durant in ‘10), burnished reputations (see: Olympic Melo and Vince Carter’s iconic 2000 dunk) and altered the trajectory of player movement within the league. The friendship and on-court chemistry formed by James, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade at the 2006 world championships and 2008 Olympics famously birthed the Heatles two years later. When DeMarcus Cousins joined the Clippers in 2021, it was partly on the recommendation of Paul George, who told team executives the center’s surly reputation didn’t line up with the joke-telling, fun-loving character he’d shared weeks with during the 2016 Olympics in Brazil.
At some point, Haliburton says, he will look back on this summer as “an insane experience” where he and a wing of future Hall of Fame teammates are on a high-profile, shared mission. But he’s keenly aware that next season, they will represent competition as he attempts his own.
Haliburton’s ambitions in Indianapolis were first stoked in 2023 during the annual Indy 500 Festival parade. While riding in the back of a 1993 Camaro, he took in the massive crowds lining the city’s streets.
“I was sitting there and I was like, Dude, if we win a championship in Indiana…” he says, trailing off in thought. “Take that parade and double it, triple it. People in Indiana love basketball. So yeah, I think about it a lot.”
It is one thing to prove people wrong by sneaking up in surprise, as Haliburton did when he went from an off-radar recruit to a lottery pick, or as he became an All-Star in Indiana. But in 2025, Haliburton will no longer have the advantage of being the hunter—not after averaging 23.6 points and 12.5 assists over last season’s first 33 games last season, as Indiana made a run to the inaugural In-Season Tournament final in Las Vegas. His success, along with the team’s, coincided with a change in his routine that prioritized maintaining his health and skills. No matter the team’s schedule, Haliburton lifted weights, touched a basketball, and got a massage every day.
“Early in the year I was in such a good place mentally, physically—the best place I've ever been in my career,” he says. “Just feeling like I woke up, went to the gym every day, like, nobody can fuck with me, you know? It's just kind of where my mentality was.”
Then, in January, he injured his hamstring, which “kind of hindered everything else, because now I’m thinking twice about everything,” he says. When that healed, he also dealt with back pain that has lingered since he was a teenager, and that locked up so severely before one road game in Charlotte that he could not leave his hotel bed.
Though he still averaged 20 and 10 and earned all-NBA third-team honors, his shooting dipped in the second half of the year, and being in and out of the lineup didn’t allow him to click with new acquisition Pascal Siakam until the first round of the playoffs. Once they were together, though, things seemed to work: Siakam, who re-signed with the Pacers in June, took Haliburton aside before the postseason and implored him to shoot more—and then manipulated Milwaukee’s defense early in the series as a scorer while still going out of his way to set up his teammate. It struck the point guard as something “great players do.” He doesn’t want to go so far as to suggest the Pacers would have won a championship had he never slipped and hurt his hamstring, but he certainly believes “we would have had a better opportunity to have more success.”
Accordingly, he knows that the next evolution of his career means sustaining his early success from last season—and proving that Indiana’s emergence was for real in a conference where New York, Boston and Philadelphia have spent the offseason engaged in a talent arm’s race.
“I'm gonna be around for a long time,” he says, “and I have full faith in that. and I gotta prove that, of course, but I guess my biggest thing is, like: this is not a one-time thing, by any means.”
Even coming off the best year of his career, he’s holding onto the sense that he’s being overlooked. “All I keep seeing is, 'Who's going to win the East? Boston, Milwaukee, New York, or Philly?'” Haliburton says. “It's like, what are we doing [not being included]? But again, we're Indiana, people didn't even know, people didn't even watch us play until the playoffs. People didn't watch us play until the second round. But again, that respect comes with winning. So if we want to gain that respect, we just got to keep having success as a team. And it's coming.”
He’s entering superstardom at a significant moment for the league. “I think the NBA is at an interesting point because obviously we still got the top dogs—LeBron, KD, Steph, those guys—but we're not far off from, I hate how ‘passing the torch’ sounds, but there's a lot of young guys who are establishing themselves, me included,” he says. “And so it's a lot of different guys gunning for different positions and different statures within the league. So I'm gonna get everybody's best shot every night.
“... So I think that's kind of interesting part: the young guys are gunning for me, because they want what I have. And the older guys, as they should, are also coming for me because they want to keep it established that this is still their league. So that's kind of the fun part of being in the middle.”
An NBA coach who has heard I’ll be interviewing Haliburton texts with a list of questions he would want to ask the Pacer. They essentially boil down to one idea: Does Haliburton understand his role as a franchise pillar to mean doing his on-court job at the highest level possible, or doing all that plus the other responsibilities not every star accepts—including courting future free agents, accepting being a walking billboard for the city, building relationships with teammates and maintaining a dialogue with team executives?
I put the question to Haliburton, who answers quickly. “People can’t refer to you as a face of a franchise if you’re not doing that stuff,” he says. “All of that comes with it, because to win in 2024 you have to recruit free agents, you have to keep guys, you have to give input to keep guys on the team. … It’s a lot. At 24, it’s a lot. But, shit, we get paid for that. How could you not do that?”
Last season he started doing all that. He checked in with each teammate once a week. He used his All-NBA bonus check to buy every Pacers teammate and staffer a Cartier watch. In a league where stars often flee for the coasts, Haliburton speaks about Indiana with a loyalty and adoration that is unique, feeling a kinship to the state because of his Midwestern roots. He likes seeing other players’ surprised reactions when he tells them he has stayed in Indianapolis for virtually the entire offseason. He doesn’t need much to get by—just a gym to work out in, a computer to stream video games with his brother on their “Haliburton Bros” YouTube channel, a Bible to ground him and a TV to watch Gossip Girl.
Johnikin, his AAU coach, had to convince Haliburton when they first met that he could be his team’s best player. When the two worked out together in June, before Haliburton reported for Team USA, the coach saw a version of Haliburton who now dreams much bigger.
“He wants to be the best in the world,” Johnikin says. “He really believes he belongs.”
This summer has, again, brought out dual desires: The instinct to pause and reflect on how good he has it, and the urge to find out how it could get even better yet.
“I never thought I'd be an elite college basketball player, let alone an All-Star, Olympian,” he says. “That confidence faded over time, and when it came back to me, I just ran with it.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Alex Hodor-Lee
Barbering by Tarin Dhamrait
Skin by Angelica Grizzard
Special thank you to Bellagio Las Vegas Hotel and Paris Las Vegas Hotel