Tyrese Haliburton Broke Down The Details Around His Achilles Injury And It Reinforced Just How Unfair Sports Can Be
Justin Ford. Getty Images.Every once in a while, I'll just be minding my own business, casually scrolling the timeline, and some sort of Jayson Tatum edit/highlight will show up and immediately all the feelings from that dreaded night on May 12th come rushing back. Each and every time, it's another shotgun blast right to the chest, without fail. My guess is that this is how it's going to be for the next year, and while some of you out there may enjoy taking pleasure in my misery (understandable), I also know that any Pacers fans out there can probably relate to what I'm talking about.
Our franchise players, on incredible postseason runs, in a game that they were COOKING in, suffered one of the worst injuries in professional basketball that changed the entire direction of the franchise. Two young stars experiencing that sort of injury is pretty damn rare, and there's no real spinzone. It fucking sucks. For the Celts, it was the confirmation that it was time to sell off pieces and enter a gap year. For the Pacers, it meant not overpaying and going into the tax to keep Myles Turner, who then left for a rival.
I felt like Pacers fans and Celtics fans already had a mutual respect for one another, given their battle in 2024 and the fact that Celts fans (and the players) were really the only ones outside of Indy that understood and acknowledged just how good the Pacers actually are and that what they were doing was NOT a fluke. The rest of the basketball world finally caught up in 2025, but none of what the 2025 Pacers accomplished was a surprise to any Celts fan. They were easily the best team Boston faced during their title run, and then they immediately backed it up with a great 2025 season.
Now, with both of their franchise players suffering the same horrific injury, in a way, it brings the two fan bases even closer. I want nothing more than Tyrese Haliburton to come back better than ever and play as if the injury never happened. He's so fun to watch, he goes about everything the right way, the NBA is better when someone like Haliburton is healthy and back to his old self.
So even though I'm not a Pacers fan, hearing Haliburton talk about his injury and then break down game by game how he was feeling made me depressed for him all over again
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What the hell Basketball Gods. Seriously, what the hell. Hearing Haliburton explain how he felt throughout the whole series, it certainly explains his tough Game 5 (4 points, 0-6), but then bouncing back in Game 6 (14/5) and feeling no pain, to then starting Game 7 in a way that felt like we were about to have a massive Haliburton performance for the NBA title only for disaster to happen is such a gut punch. You also got a look into his mindset of deciding to play, even though we all knew what the potential risk was. Even knowing what we know now, I don't blame Haliburton one bit for taking that risk. You may never get back to the Finals again in your career, I think it's a little unfair to think a player of his caliber would sit, even if that's the "smart" thing to do. The worst-case scenario happened, but that's life sometimes. He clearly passed whatever tests the medical staff required him to take, and it really just came down to one bad step. Brutal.
It's hard to hear Haliburton talk about this whole situation and not root for him. From everything we've heard about rehabbing an Achilles injury, it's not just the physical aspect that's tough, it's the mental grind. You basically have to rebuild yourself as a basketball player
and a huge part of that rebuild is your mental state. The good news is that ever since the moment he came out of surgery, Haliburton seems to have the right mentality. Hopefully, that mentality is what helps him come back better than ever, because he's without a doubt one of the more exciting point guards to watch in the league