Key Highlights
- Haliburton’s blend of passing, scoring, and decision-making makes him one of the best offensive players in the league
- Haliburton’s weak defense and lack of a playoff sample size keeps him from being a true MVP contender
- What Haliburton is doing right now is a little bit different from what Steve Nash was doing in the mid-2000s
The Indiana Pacers are 8-5 and the proud owners of the best offense in the NBA (they are also the first team to ever qualify for the Knockout Round of the NBA Play-In Tournament). And all that is in large part thanks to the play of fourth-year showman Tyrese Haliburton.
In fact, Halliburton has been so good that he’s even generating some MVP buzz. But what is it that makes him so good? And is he really an MVP-caliber player in 2023-24?
What Makes Haliburton Special
The number one thing you need to know about Haliburton is that he plays fast. And we’re not talking Michael Jordan first step fast. We’re talking blink, and the entire possession might be over fast.
In the clip below, pay attention to the shot clock. Only one second comes off of it between the time Haliburton secures the defensive rebound and launches a fullcourt rocket over to a streaking Obi Toppin.
Ever since Steve Nash (more on him later on) and the ‘Seven Seconds or Less’ Phoenix Suns revolutionized offense in basketball by racing up and down the court at a breakneck pace, the key to elite offense has been to create high-value looks early in the shot clock. And under Haliburton’s guidance, the Pacers are doing just that. On the season, Indiana is third in the NBA in frequency of shots taken with 22-18 seconds left on the shotclock (per NBA.com).
Haliburton’s penchant for playing with pace gets at a much larger theme about his game. Once, while sitting in on a varsity high school basketball practice, I heard a player telling his teammate something along the lines of, “The defense can’t take away everything. There is always a counter for what they are doing.”
Whether he knew it or not, what the boy was talking about here is the central premise of read-and-react basketball. Read what the defense is doing and react based on that. And our friend Haliburton might just be the leading expert in this field.Take this next clip, for instance. Here, the Utah Jazz try switching the Pacers’ screening action to slow down Indiana’s offense.
However, Haliburton quickly…