Indiana Pacers: The “wannabe all-star” shows why Wally Szczerbiak was completely wrong

On Monday night, Wally Szczerbiak called Indiana Pacers’ guard a “supposed, wannabe, fake all-star”. The clip went viral and people all over the internet were talking about how it sounded like Wally might have some personal issues with Haliburton.

For context, Tyrese Haliburton has been having an awesome year, leading the Pacers in every way and playing at an elite level. He has looked every bit the part of a franchise cornerstone and is making the Sacramento Kings look like they may have made a huge mistake.

The next opportunity for Tyrese Haliburton to respond to the trash talk was against the Celtics on Wednesday night. And respond he did.

In response on Wednesday, Tyrese Haliburton unloaded in the first quarter with a stat line of 15 points and 5 assists in 12 total minutes. And Pacers Twitter responded in full force. Here are some of the highlights in response:

And they aren’t wrong, Tyrese looked like he took that very personally.

If you don’t want to curse the next team playing the Indiana Pacers, you best not talk trash about Haliburton before the game.

That +20 in the first quarter is impressive. It would be impressive across a whole game, but in one quarter?!

One can only hope that this is the beginning of playing like Paul George consistently. But for a brief moment, we got to see the player that Haliburton can become.

For those who don’t know, Wally Szczerbiak did make one all-star team, but he was never anything to write home about. Tyrese on the other hand looks like a generational young star. We think that Tyrese came out of the gate playing like prime Chris Paul with Wally Szczerbiak on the other team.

We remember, and we think Tyrese might too. For what it’s worth, Wally did get on television again and apologize to Tyrese Haliburton and walk his comments back a bit.

So let’s take a quick look at the comparison between the two players.

Wally in his all-star year: 18.7 pts, 3.1 assists, 4.8 RB on 51% field goal shooting

Haliburton this year: 19.5 pts, 10.7 assists, 4.0 RB on 47% field goal shooting

Wally’s numbers look a bit worse that Haliburton’s this year, and that is taking this year against the best year that Wally ever had. Haliburton has more points, assists, and almost the same number of rebounds on basically the same field goal percentage. So it’s hard to call Tyrese Haliburton a fake wannabe all-star when Wally’s numbers weren’t much better.

So I guess the question is, was Wally the fake wannabe all-star?

Only time will tell how Haliburton’s year played out, but personally, perhaps Wally should calm down a little on the trash talk.