Pacers’ Haliburton should be a fringe MVP candidate after recent slump

Pacers’ star Tyrese Haliburton continues to be out with injury as the team eagerly awaits for him to return. In his absence, the Pacers are 0-5 and have looked relatively bad without their leader on the floor.

Prior to this five game skid, the Pacers had been playing extremely well, largely in part to the play of Tyrese Haliburton. They had won 6 out of 7 and were seemingly firing on all cylinders. So just how much of a difference does Tyrese Haliburton make while he is on the court?

If you look at just his regular statistics, Haliburton is clearly a talented and valuable player to the Indiana Pacers:

22-23 stats:

• 20.2 points
• 4.0 rebounds
• 10.2 assists (1st in league)
• 48% FG
• 39.9% FG3

But the advanced statistics are where Haliburton really begins to shine and his impact is shown.

22-23 advanced stats (rank in league):

• 23.4 Player Efficiency Rating (16th)
• 5.5 Win Shares (11th)
• 7.3 Plus/Minus (7th)
• 6.7 Offensive Plus/Minus (5th)
• 3.1 Value over replacement player (5th)

In fact, if you take Haliburton’s performance in some of the biggest advanced statistics in the NBA and average them against his peers, he performs fairly well against the rest of the NBA.

This puts Tyrese Haliburton square between Jayson Tatum and Steph Curry, two players that commonly show up in MVP discussions. The leaders are the usual suspects in Luka Doncic, Nikola Jokic, and Joel Embiid.

This puts Tyrese Haliburton square between Jayson Tatum and Steph Curry, two players that commonly show up in MVP discussions.

And rightfully so, Doncic/Jokic/Embiid are all-time level players that are doing thing on the court that have never been seen before. But there is an argument to be made that Haliburton is as important to the Pacers as many of these players are to their teams (barring Luka, the cast of characters around him bring before Miami-era Lebron comparisons).

Haliburton will get overlooked to some degree being in Indiana. Our best players will always be at a disadvantage to major markets that many perennial MVP candidates play in. But if Giannis has proved anything, a player on a small market franchise can eventually break through so that the country has to take notice.

We think that Haliburton may be on the brink of making the country notice. Notice that the Pacers are a force to be reckoned with and not to be taken lightly.