NBA fans are often blinded by one singular bad-faith idea: that development in basketball is entirely linear. In the same way that playoff surprisers refuse to believe that they could fall back into the lottery, bad teams insist that they will be great.
The Indiana Pacers are simultaneously in both of those situations while not being in a middle ground between their two extremes.
On one hand, they are just a year removed from making the Finals and pushing the eventual champion OKC Thunder to seven games before their franchise superstar exploded his Achilles tendon. On the other hand, they won just 19 games last year and still have no answer for how good that superstar will be after spending a full season rehabbing his leg.
That leaves Indiana in the basketball equivalent of purgatory as the season approaches. Aiming just to make the playoffs feels like it's not asking enough of a team with three all-star-level players and a handful of very useful role players.
At the same time, asking a Pacers team that has not played together at full strength in nearly 400 days to click and immediately regain their championship form is also a test we can realistically consider too tall.
This would lead to the unhappy third option of measuring expectations, but even that feels like the antithesis of what it means to be a fan.
So, instead of measuring success by the actual level the team can reach, the focus should be on a pretty obvious elephant in the room: is Tyrese Haliburton ever going to be able to get back to the level he was at in the 2024-25 NBA Playoffs?
Tyrese and the tale of two turnarounds
When we discuss Achilles tendon tears, there are a few names that come to mind. There's Kevin Durant, who managed to return to top-five-player-in-the-league levels, and there's Jayson Tatum, who torpedoed his team's season while failing to play remotely well enough to justify the circus he brought.
Beyond those two, it's worth noting that the only players before the 2020s to return to a level after their Achilles tears are Dominique Wilkins and... Wesley Matthews? Maybe? And that's Dominique Wilkins. He is an anomaly in his own right.
We've seen a lot of Achilles tears in the past few years. Damian Lillard, Jayson Tatum, and Tyrese Haliburton all suffered their injuries in the same few months of the playoffs two years ago. Donte Divincenzo was another victim this past summer.
It remains to be seen how these guys will bounce back, but the hope isn't as optimistic as it is with, say, an ACL tear.
Haliburton is too vital to how this team plays to be mediocre while the Pacers return to their former glory. They will go as he does. Either he succeeds and Indiana joins him, or those twelve minutes in Game 7 become the biggest what if in Pacers history, if it's not already.
The only thing the Pacers can hope for is that Haliburton looks good. Even if the team barely sneaks into the playoffs, disappointing those fans with title hopes, that will be enough to keep building in this era.
That would be enough for 2025-26 to be a good season.
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