Haliburton lights up Indiana

Tyrese Haliburton is already one of the best game directors in the world.

Intelligent, patient, decisive, possessing an enormous range of resources and surprisingly clear-sighted for his limited experience.

He exhibits, in a natural way, one of the definitive virtues: making any action that is far from it seem simple, almost automatic.

At just 22 years old, the Indiana Pacers point guard leads the NBA in assists per game (11.2) at the start of the season in which his team is also a revelation.

However, until not too long ago, his profession on the track contrasted overwhelmingly with his ingenuity off it.

Because Haliburton thought, just a few months ago, that the NBA was something close to a fairy tale.

A universe without edges.

He assumed it until a call, on the morning of February 8, he came sharply to explain the face of the business that he (still) did not know.

In that call his agent, Dave Spahn, told him that he had been transferred.

Haliburton, who was then in his second season with the Sacramento Kings, was going through a sweet moment.

Less than 48 hours before the words that would begin to change his life, he had 13 points and 17 assists against Oklahoma.

And just a week earlier he had gone for 38 points and seven basket passes in Philadelphia.

There seemed to be no sporting reason for it.

It was not even the most difficult thing to digest: days before the move, the franchise assured him that his name was out of any possible negotiation.

Tyrese Haliburton is the first player in @nba history with 40 assists and 0 turnovers in a three-game span.

pic.twitter.com/0EO2ubH0Zb

— Indiana Pacers (@Pacers) November 29, 2022

"It's a joke, right?" He replied to Spahn during that brief conversation.

But it wasn't.

He had to pack his bags and head to Indiana.

The journalist Alex Kennedy recounted that the player could not help but cry, for almost an hour, after hearing the news.

Less than a year and a half earlier, Sacramento was betting on him in the

.

And his subsequent performance, excellent, justified that bet.

But in a single call that future, imagined a thousand times, making the Kings reborn, completely vanished.

All his innocence was buried there.

In that movement the Kings obtained the Lithuanian Domantas Sabonis, the interior piece on which to reformulate their project.

And the Pacers took the guy who, spending most of his life under the radar (no major university was interested in his services), no longer had just his knowledge and talent to offer.

Also the teachings that cause the first big scar.

Haliburton, a point guard by vocation and devotion, grew up watching his father play one Magic Johnson video after another, until he endorsed that old saying that a basket makes one player happy but an assist makes two happy.

But during the past summer the immense flow of him generating play for the rest of him found, in the extra motivation to assert himself, the ideal complement.

Working alongside Drew Hanlen, one of the most prestigious individual technique coaches on the American scene, he honed his scoring instincts.

Thus he would record on fire that each situation of blocking and continuation became not only a source of a pass but also its own completion.

That each meter conceded by the defense became an inalienable opportunity to launch.

That every slightest concession was, ultimately, an appeal to him to be the executioner himself.

The result, observed these days, is fascinating.

Haliburton has raised the volume of his pitches without losing an iota of brilliance producing for others.

In fact, he reaches the peak of his young career in assists distributed for each lost ball (over four) and solves a gigantic volume of

situations (the fourth largest in the NBA) with the mastery of the veteran who already knows all the tricks.

Only in his case without having turned 23.

Tyrese Haliburton with a spinning no-look 🌪

Use code NBA50 at checkout for 50% off NBA League Pass ➡ https://t.co/1pomR04bRi pic.twitter.com/rH0bsjUCU6

— NBA (@NBA) November 27, 2022

Thus, if the start of the campaign opened the door to the new Haliburton, the most incisive known (22 points per game during the month of October), what was seen in November has returned his version of the magician king (12 assists per duel losing only two balls in them).

This mixture, deep down what is longed for, is the seed of a monster that can illuminate one's position for the next decade.

That it may even have already begun to do so.

Only 13 players in NBA history have managed to average, over an entire season, at least 20 points and 10 assists per game.

None of them have done so, adding, in turn, a 37% success rate in the triple.

But Haliburton could be on its way to debuting a new roster.

In the end, his basketball, orderly and rational, these days try the cocktail with a more dizzying and voracious side, one born —in part— as a result of the pain of a disappointment.

To make both scenarios compatible Indiana, a land with a deep and permanent aroma of basketball, could have found much more than an extraordinary point guard.

It already has the great pillar for its rebirth.

You can follow EL PAÍS Deportes on

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber