Tyrese Haliburton returned from a torn right Achilles on Oct. 7, playing 16 minutes and finishing with seven points and six assists as the Indiana Pacers beat the Minnesota Timberwolves 123-112 in a preseason opener at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, his alma mater.
The two-time All-Star guard had waited 16 months to return. He had torn the Achilles during Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals. With 4:27 left in the first quarter, he finally checked in, and his first basket in more than a year came soon after. On a 2-on-1 break with Pascal Siakam, he finished with a crossover into a 15-foot jumper.
“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 game carried extra emotion. Students lined up the night before to get into the student section and grab yellow shirts with Haliburton’s face on them, marked with the nickname “Cyclone Hali.” It was his first game at his college arena in six years.
“I have my own internal expectations,” Haliburton said. “But our goal is to win a championship. That has never wavered.”
A season that tested the Pacers
Haliburton’s return matters because of how much Indiana depends on him. Before he got hurt, he produced one of the great clutch postseason runs in NBA history, hitting 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 win the title. While Haliburton spent the 2025-26 season recovering, the Pacers won just 19 games, the fewest in franchise history.
That record makes Indiana one of the most puzzling teams entering the 2026-27 season. The Pacers reached the conference finals in both 2024 and 2025, but they are projected to win a modest 42 games and rank 10th in the Eastern Conference, according to the 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.”
Pacers general manager Chad Buchanan said the team’s core believes in itself despite the doubts.
“Finding that magic again, that’s no guarantee,” 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.”
Giving back in Indianapolis
Before training camp, Haliburton and his wife, Jade, visited children at Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis. He was there as a spokesperson for the Indiana Donor Network to raise awareness for organ donation. The five kids in attendance had received kidney transplants.
Sitting around a table with coloring sheets, Haliburton asked the children about their favorite colors, sparking a lively debate. One child said red, another said blue, and another said yellow. One insisted that rainbow was its own color. When Haliburton said his favorite was gray, the kids recoiled.
“You never hear that, huh?” he said with a smile.
Haliburton spent much of the past year in Indianapolis taking on community projects. Earlier this summer, he helped the Pacers revive their charity softball game, which featured players from the Indianapolis Colts and Indiana Fever. Fans filled Victory Field, a 12,000-seat Triple-A baseball stadium downtown.
Haliburton has deep ties to the Midwest. He was born in Wisconsin, met his wife in Ames and proposed there. His connection to the region has grown since the Pacers traded for 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.”
The long road back
Recovery was harder than Haliburton expected. 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 hit hard. 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.
He also dealt with a severe case of shingles during rehab. The illness, which is highly contagious, kept him away from his teammates on the sideline. The heavy medication caused him to gain 30 pounds and left him with severe face swelling.
“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,” Haliburton said. “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.”
Buchanan praised Haliburton’s approach to the team.
“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 recovery, Haliburton sometimes watched old highlights.
“Just to feel something,” he said. “I once could do that. I miss that feeling.”
He even rewatched the 2025 Finals. His focus stayed on Game 4, when the Pacers led the series 2-1. The Thunder rallied from double-digit deficits in the second half, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scored 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.”
Rebuilding the habits
Haliburton does not want the Pacers to forget last season. 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 club 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 practice, the team gathered at Buchanan’s house, on the floor of his indoor basketball court. The gathering has become an annual tradition over the past four years, a chance for the Pacers to set priorities for the season.
Coach Rick Carlisle lamented how long the summer had been. It had been 5½ months since the Pacers’ 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 said having Haliburton back was important, but he warned against seeing him as a savior.
“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, Andrew Nembhard and Aaron Nesmith. Ivica Zubac arrived to replace the departed Myles Turner in a trade deadline deal that cost Indiana the No. 5 pick in the draft. Team sources say the Pacers are confident the move will help reopen their championship window. They also acknowledge that Zubac, who plays closer to the basket, offers different strengths than Turner, a center who stretched the floor from 3-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 could take time. Haliburton and Zubac have struggled with their timing in pick-and-roll sets during the preseason, with Haliburton often turning the corner before his new center could 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 growing pains showed in his first game back. He compared himself to a rookie, playing too fast and needing to slow down so the offense could find its rhythm. He tweaked his right ankle during the game and sat out the next preseason contest. 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.”
His confidence grew during the summer. In late July, 13 months after surgery, he took one dribble and tossed the ball toward the basket. The ball bounced just short inside the practice facility, and Haliburton chased it, crossed it between his legs in midair and dunked with his right hand while staff members erupted. He had a running bet with strength and conditioning coach Erik Huddleston: 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.
He later posted a video of the dunk on his social media accounts, sending a clear message to the rest of the league.
A quieter moment a month later may have said even more. During a minicamp scrimmage in Los Angeles before the season, Haliburton fell to the floor. A few months earlier, the gym would have gone silent, waiting for him to get up, as it had the night he was injured in Oklahoma City.
This time, nothing happened. He got up, and the game continued.
“That,” he said, “makes me feel normal again.”