Tyrese Haliburton’s first preseason shift back carried the usual opening-night jitters, plus 16 months of waiting. Indiana’s point guard checked out with 4:27 left in the first quarter against Minnesota in Ames, Iowa, exhausted but smiling at the simple fact that he had NBA minutes again.
| Pacers preseason opener | Figure |
|---|---|
| Indiana result vs. Minnesota | 123-112 win |
| Haliburton minutes | 16 |
| Haliburton points | 7 |
| Haliburton assists | 6 |
| Time between NBA appearances | 16 months |
| Pacers wins in 2025-26 | 19 |
| Current projected Indiana win total | 42 |
“I was tired as hell,” Haliburton said after the game, laughing. “But even through that, I just kept feeling like, ‘Man, I’m playing again.’”
The Oct. 7 exhibition was staged at Iowa State, the place where Haliburton starred before entering the league and where he met his wife, Jade. It was his first time playing in that building in six years. Students lined up the previous night for the student section and yellow “Cyclone Hali” shirts.
On Indiana’s first trip, Haliburton tried a no-look feed for Andrew Nembhard that sailed out of bounds. His next possession looked more familiar: a two-on-one break with Pascal Siakam, a crossover and a 15-foot pull-up for his first field goal since the 2025 NBA Finals.
That Finals run remains the backdrop for everything Indiana is trying to reclaim. Haliburton hit a tying or winning basket in every round of the 2025 postseason, then ruptured his right Achilles in the first quarter of Game 7 in Oklahoma City. Indiana had an early lead before the injury changed the night and Oklahoma City went on to finish its title run.
A return built around more than one player
Haliburton’s absence swallowed the following season. The Pacers finished with 19 victories, the lowest total in franchise history, after injuries emptied out the rotation early and the club began positioning itself for draft value later in the year.
Indiana enters 2026-27 with much of its recent core intact: Haliburton, Siakam, Nembhard and Aaron Nesmith remain central to the plan. But the roster has a different frontcourt shape after Ivica Zubac arrived in the deal that sent out Myles Turner and ultimately cost Indiana the No. 5 draft pick.
Zubac gives the Pacers a more interior-based center than Turner, whose perimeter range had long been a part of Indiana’s spacing. The early preseason work has shown the adjustment. Haliburton and Zubac have had timing issues in pick-and-roll actions, with the guard occasionally getting around the corner before Zubac can get into his roll.
The Pacers believe the move can help reopen their championship window, even if the fit needs time. Coach Rick Carlisle has stressed that the club cannot treat Haliburton’s return as a one-man rescue operation.
“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, made us a special team was our connectivity, our ecosystem, dependence on one another. We’re always going to be better as the sum of all the parts.”
At the annual preseason gathering at general manager Chad Buchanan’s home court, the group settled on one word for the season: reclaim. The message followed a long summer — roughly 5½ months since Indiana’s final game in April — and a year that looked nothing like the club that reached the conference finals in 2024 and the NBA Finals in 2025.
Haliburton understands why Indiana has been slotted 10th in the East with a 42-win projection. “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,” he said. “There’s standards that we didn’t meet that we got to get back to.”
Still, the locker room sees familiar fuel in being discounted. Indiana was the last team to eliminate the champion New York Knicks in a playoff series, and its leadership group remembers how little was expected before its previous postseason runs.
“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.”
The difficult middle of recovery
For Haliburton, the road back was not just a matter of checking rehab milestones. He spent much of his recovery in Indianapolis, often joining the team on the bench for home and road games even as the losses piled up.
A vacation a few months after surgery drove home how far he had fallen physically. He struggled to get down the stairs in the rented house and needed help getting around outside. He cried in the shower while trying to absorb the sudden change from a Finals stage to basic mobility limitations.
“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 shingles during rehab. Heavy medication caused severe facial swelling and he gained 30 pounds. Because the illness is contagious, he had to stay away from teammates on the sideline at a time when he was already separated from the game.
Buchanan said Haliburton resisted the detached, star-player recovery routine that can emerge after a major injury. “That’s not how Ty’s wired,” Buchanan said. “Ty is wired to know what does the team need from me, rather than what I need to do for the team.”
There were lonely moments when he watched old clips of himself simply to feel close to the player he had been. He even revisited the 2025 Finals, with Game 4 sticking in his mind. Indiana led the series 2-1, but Oklahoma City erased a double-digit second-half deficit as Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scored 15 of his 35 points in the last 4:38.
“Game 4 will forever live in my brain,” Haliburton said. “You win that game, the whole series changes.”
Normal again in the gym and the city
Haliburton’s recovery also gave him a different relationship with Indianapolis and the Midwest. Born in Wisconsin and rooted in Ames, he has deepened his ties to Indiana since arriving in the 2022 trade that brought him to the Pacers.
Before training camp, he and Jade visited children at Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital while working with the Indiana Donor Network to promote organ donation. The children at the event had received kidney transplants. Around a coloring table, Haliburton debated favorite colors with the kids, objecting to an orange-and-blue Pacers jersey drawing because it resembled Knicks colors.
He also helped revive the Pacers’ charity softball event during the summer. Players from the Indiana Fever and Indianapolis Colts joined the program at Victory Field, which was filled at its 12,000-seat capacity.
“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.”
On the court, one late-July workout gave the Pacers a much louder marker. Thirteen months after surgery, Haliburton chased a self-toss near the basket, collected the ball in the air, went between his legs and finished a right-handed dunk. The move — an Eastbay dunk — was not something he had routinely pulled off since his rookie season.
He had a deal with strength and conditioning coach Erik Huddleston: make the dunk and skip the post-practice workout. Haliburton made it, screamed louder than anyone in the building and later posted the clip.
A month later, at a player minicamp in Los Angeles, a quieter sequence meant even more. Haliburton fell during a scrimmage. Months earlier, an entire gym would have stopped to watch for signs of trouble. This time, he got back up and play continued.
“That,” Haliburton said, “makes me feel normal again.”
He did tweak his right ankle in the Minnesota game and missed Indiana’s next preseason outing. An MRI showed no issue with the repaired Achilles. Haliburton called himself overly excited in his return, like a rookie playing too fast, but the message from Ames was clear enough: the Pacers have their lead guard back on the floor, and now they have to rebuild the habits around him.
