The trolls finally got one, but not for long.
NBA social media has become a cesspool of negativity, where fans come together to commiserate about why this player is overrated and that team is garbage. Today’s athletes are so inundated with criticism from the anonymous morass that most of them have learned to push it away.
Even when it affects them, they rarely admit it publicly. Bullies only get their power from the acknowledgment. But everybody has their moments.
For the first month of this season, as his Indiana Pacers were losing and he was playing his worst basketball in years, that was Tyrese Haliburton. To the outside world, it looked like his dominant form from 2023 may have been a mirage. Internally, Haliburton started to wonder if they were right.
“I got too caught up in outside noise and allowing myself to think such negative thoughts about myself internally,” Haliburton shared with The Athletic recently. “It was the first time in my life that I had real self-doubt behind everything I was doing. … I feel like my personal struggles were leading to the team’s struggles.
“A lot of our games early, that we were right there to win, I just wasn’t playing my best basketball and I think that was taking away from us winning games.”
Last season, the Pacers marched on to the Eastern Conference finals, even if Haliburton’s form fell off after a midseason hamstring injury. They entered this campaign with hopes of taking the next step, but things went south early on as their star player still looked like a shell of himself.
When Haliburton was in a funk in the past, he would pull out his phone and seek the trolls trashing him. He often would do it during halftime, looking for fuel to power the Pacers’ redlining offense. Proving haters wrong was the cathartic release he needed to get in touch with himself and his game.
The problem was — from the moment this season started — he knew better than anyone that he couldn’t clap back. He went scoreless in the second game of the season, a blowout loss to the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden, and knew something wasn’t right.
Haliburton was telling confidants that he was playing poorly, reading his mentions and actually agreeing for a change. That’s when his skills trainer Drew Hanlen could see the pressure was getting to the 24-year-old.
“This year, for whatever reason, it was just hurting him,” Hanlen said.
The more he struggled, the more he receded into old habits. Haliburton lost his aggression to attack the paint, unable to beat defenders with a first step off of that recovering hamstring.
He looked tentative, trying to sit back as a distributor and losing some of the edge that made him a two-time All-Star. The problem was twofold, starting with his health.
“He rushed back early last year to make the All-NBA 65-game rule and he was never fully healthy,” Hanlen said. “Then at the Olympics, he re-aggravated it. So after the Olympics, he couldn’t work out and had to let it heal. So he worked out zero times the entire summer.”
The breaking point came in Charlotte on Nov. 8, a 20-point loss that sent the team spiraling below .500. He once again missed every 3, couldn’t get to the line and fully accepted he was the problem.
“It was so bad,” Haliburton said. “That was the first time I was so frustrated with myself, so frustrated with the group. But it was more about myself. How can I be better?”
Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton hit rock bottom in a loss at Charlotte on Nov. 8. (Robert Goddin / Imagn Images)
It started with cutting out the distractions and sources of anxiety. He deleted X from his phone in an attempt to go cold turkey on immersive doomscrolling. He started going back to church, recognizing he was getting caught up within himself and wanting to look at the positives in life.
“That’s been good for me to read my Bible more. It’s been good for me,” he said. “My relationship with the Lord has been really big for me internally, to be the best version of myself and just trying to pour energy into our group and that’s been helping us.
“After that, things have clicked and changed for me. I feel light years better.”
Haliburton was not the same player entering the season, but the Pacers changed as well. Andrew Nembhard showed in the postseason he could be the two-way guard the team needed, while Bennedict Mathurin’s return from a torn labrum added another scorer to the mix.
This roster did not call for Haliburton to dominate the ball like he did in the past, especially with his quickness in the half court diminished. To figure out his future with the Pacers, he had to tap into his past.
When he was drafted by the Sacramento Kings in 2020, he had to squeeze his distinct skill set into a crowded backcourt. De’Aaron Fox was the star point guard and Buddy Hield was the shooting guard, two traditional representations of the positions. Where did a fluid playmaker fit into the dynamic?
Hield taught him how to move in space to make himself open, even when the opposing coach wrote on the locker room whiteboard with a cascade of underlines to not let that happen. Though Haliburton said he initially couldn’t stand the way Hield played, they eventually found a synergy playing off each other. When the two friends were traded to the Pacers together, coach Rick Carlisle put the ball in Haliburton’s hands full time and they started running the two-man actions they were developing…