THE SWEAT FROM Tyrese Haliburton’s Indiana Pacers jersey almost immediately began to seep into his blue warmup shirt.
For 16 months, the two-time All-Star guard had been patiently -- and then not so patiently -- and then practically champing at the bit to leave his seat on the sideline and play minutes in an NBA game.
On Oct. 7, he finally did. The Pacers were playing in Ames, Iowa, at Iowa State University, Haliburton’s alma mater, where it was a two-part homecoming.
It was his first game at his college arena in six years. Students began lining up the night before the game to get into the student section and grab a yellow shirt with Haliburton’s face on it over the moniker “Cyclone Hali.” And it was also Haliburton’s first seven minutes in a game since tearing his right Achilles during Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals.
With 4:27 remaining in the first quarter of the Pacers’ preseason opener against the Minnesota Timberwolves on Oct. 7, Haliburton relished a different moment: his first break.
“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.’”
On Indiana’s first possession of the game, an antsy Haliburton fired a no-look pass, intended for Andrew Nembhard, out of bounds. But with that out of the way, on the next possession, Haliburton ran a 2-on-1 with Pascal Siakam that Haliburton finished with a crossover into a 15-foot jumper for his first basket in more than a year.
The adrenaline of the night carried him through 16 minutes of action. Haliburton finished with seven points and six assists in the Pacers’ 123-112 win.
“I have my own internal expectations,” Haliburton told ESPN. “But our goal is to win a championship. That has never wavered.”
The Pacers’ season -- and Indiana’s road back to contention -- depends on those expectations.
The last time Haliburton was healthy, he electrified the NBA with one of the greatest clutch postseason runs in NBA history, with a game-tying or 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 marched their way to the record books.
While Haliburton spent the 2025-26 season recovering, the Pacers won 19 games.
It makes Indiana one of the most perplexing teams coming into the 2026-27 NBA season. Despite making the conference finals in 2024 and the conference finals in 2025, the Pacers are projected to win a modest 42 games and ranked 10th in the Eastern Conference, according to ESPN’s Basketball Power Index.
“I don’t look too much into it,” Haliburton told ESPN. “Our whole team can relate to that. We’ve all felt that way one way or another.”
The Pacers are the last team to beat the champion New York Knicks in a playoff series. But in a more competitive East than the last one he left, Haliburton is out to prove that the Pacers can reclaim their spot at the top.
“Finding that magic again, that’s no guarantee,” Pacers general manager Chad Buchanan told ESPN. “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.”
THE ZERO IN the middle of the jersey was orange, matching the trim on a jersey that had been shaded with blue in the middle. As Haliburton picked up the sheet of paper, he scoffed.
“Who drew this one?” he asked. “Orange and blue on a Pacers jersey?”
“Knicks colors,” his wife, Jade, said with a knowing smile.
With training camp still a few weeks away, the Haliburtons visited children at the Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis.
Haliburton was there as a spokesperson for the Indiana Donor Network to raise awareness for organ donation. The five kids in attendance are recipients of kidney transplants.
Sitting around a table, Haliburton and the children, some as young as 6, gathered sheets of paper to color. A raucous debate immediately ensued.
“What’s your favorite color?” Haliburton asked his tablemates, launching an animated discussion.
“Red!” one kid said. “Blue!” said another. “Yellow!”
“Rainbow!” another said, inciting another debate as to whether all the colors can be considered one color. He insisted it could.
“But is there a rainbow marker?” Haliburton prods, presenting the question as a color-form of checkmate. When Haliburton suggests his favorite color is grey, the kids recoil. “You never hear that, huh?” he says with a smile.
Haliburton spent much of the past year in Indianapolis launching himself into projects such as these.
He helped the Pacers revitalize their charity softball game earlier this summer, featuring players from the Indianapolis Colts and Indiana Fever. Fans packed Victory Field, a 12,000-seat Triple-A baseball stadium in downtown Indianapolis.
Haliburton’s connection to the Midwest is deep. He was born in Wisconsin and met and eventually proposed to his wife in Ames. His bond to the region has only deepened since he was traded to Indiana in 2022.
It’s why he has poured so much into the community.
“It’s a different perspective on life now,” Haliburton told ESPN. “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.”
During his first vacation a few months after surgery, he could barely walk down the stairs at a house they had rented and needed assistance getting around when they left. His surgeon had warned him, but the reality had set in. 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 told ESPN.
“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. 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.”
He spent most of his recovery in Indianapolis, finding a spot on the bench for game nights, home and road, even as the season went south. But in the middle of his rehab, he dealt with a bad case of the shingles, too, gaining 30 pounds and suffering from severe face swelling as a side effect of the heavy medication. The illness, which is highly contagious, kept him away from his teammates on the sidelines. It was another blow in a long season.
“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 lonely, arduous recovery, he would occasionally fire up some of his old highlights.
“Just to feel something,” he said. “I once could do that. I miss that feeling.”
At one point, he even rewatched the 2025 Finals, he said. His focus remained on Game 4. The Pacers were leading 2-1, but the Thunder rallied from down double-digits in the second half as Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scored 15 of his 35 points in the final 4:38 of the game.
“Game 4 will forever live in my brain,” Haliburton said. “You win that game, the whole series changes.”
The thought sat with him as he watched his team go through its worst season in franchise history, realizing so much of the conversation around the Pacers’ struggles centered on him, his injury, his recovery and his eventual return.
“Everybody always feels the summer is really long,” Haliburton said. “Well, I’ve had that for double, triple the amount of time everybody else.”
HALIBURTON DOESN’T WANT the Pacers to forget last season.
Indiana finished with its fewest wins in franchise history. The team was decimated by injuries early, and started to position itself for a better draft pick by the second half. By the end of the season, the team looked like a shell of the one that went to 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 been focused on rebuilding those habits.
The night before the first day of practice, the team gathered at Buchanan’s house on the floor at his indoor basketball court. It has become an annual tradition for the past four years, a moment when the Pacers can iron out their priorities heading into the season.
Coach Rick Carlisle lamented how long the summer had been. It had been 5½ months since their last game in April, and even longer since their last game with anything on the line.
“Reclaim” ended up being the key word during the meeting.
Carlisle acknowledged how important it was to have Haliburton back, but cautioned against looking at Haliburton as a savior.
“We’re a team that’s very reliant on one another,” Carlisle said before the game in Ames last week. “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 Pacers’ core is the same -- Haliburton, Siakam, Nembhard and Aaron Nesmith -- but Ivica Zubac was brought in to replace the departed Myles Turner in a trade deadline deal that ended up costing Indiana the No. 5 pick in the draft.
Team sources say the Pacers are confident that the deal will help reopen their championship window. They also acknowledge Zubac, who plays closer to the basket, will provide different strengths than Turner, a center who stretches the floor from 3-point range.
“We have a great coach who figures things out,” Buchanan told ESPN. “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 with Zubac could take time. His individual fit with Haliburton could, too. They’ve struggled with their timing in pick-and-rolls early in the preseason, with Haliburton often rounding the corner before his new center has an opportunity to roll.
“He’s so anxious to prove to people. He hates that people say he’ll have to be patient. He hates that,” Buchanan told ESPN. “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.”
HALIBURTON MOVED LIKE his former self at times, but the growing pains were evident in his first game back.
He compared himself to a rookie, playing too fast and needing to slow down to let the offense find its rhythm. He tweaked his right ankle during the game, and sat out the next preseason game, but an MRI confirmed 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.”
Multiple moments in the gym this summer gave him reason for the confidence.
One afternoon in late July, 13 months after his surgery, he took one dribble and tossed the ball into the air toward the basket. As he raced after it, the ball bounced just short of the basket inside the Pacers’ practice facility, its upward trajectory almost carrying him higher toward the rim than he has been in years. Midair, he crossed the ball between his legs, and rose toward the hoop, dunking the ball with his right hand as various members of the Pacers’ staff let out a collective scream.
But it was Haliburton who screamed the loudest, releasing more than a year of pent-up angst.
He had a running bet with Erik Huddleston, Indiana’s strength and conditioning coach, that if he completed the dunk, named an Eastbay, Haliburton could skip his post-practice workout.
It’s a dunk Haliburton hadn’t regularly made since he was a 20-year-old rookie.
Later, Haliburton posted a video of the dunk to his social media accounts, and the message to the rest of the league was obvious.
I’m back.
The dunk signified Haliburton’s flashy arrival, but it was a quieter moment a month later that sent an even louder signal.
Before the start of the season, Pacers players held a minicamp in Los Angeles.
At one point during a scrimmage, Haliburton fell to the floor. A few months before, everyone in the gym would have gone hush, waiting for him to get back to his feet, similar to what happened that night in Oklahoma City.
But this time, nothing happened. He got up. The game continued.
“That,” he said, “makes me feel normal again.”