If there were two things that fans wanted to hear from Indiana Pacers Media Day, they would have been: 1) Tyrese Haliburton's Achilles is good to go, and 2) that Tyrese Haliburton is ready to start the season after rehabbing his Achilles injury (yes, those are the same thing, that's the point).
It seems blind to say that nothing else matters. But while giving credence to the fact that basketball is a team game, and there are any number of different things that could happen to lead to a successful season... nothing else really matters.
To that end, media day must have seemed like an oasis for Pacers fans, after a long and miserable summer in which everyone was questioning whether they had made a good choice with the Ivica Zubac trade, and if Indiana would ever get back to their winning ways.
In Haliburton's own words, he's back, and he's raring to go.
""I am healthy. I am 100%. There will be no restrictions. That is not news. There is no source. I am the source. I am ready to go for the year.""Tyrese Haliburton
As if that assurance wasn't enough, there was more. There was a new mentality, a disappointment, a fire that had only grown over a year-long absence.
This is the dogma that the Pacers will need to apply to their entire season, not just to Haliburton's recovery, but to their, but to the claim they plan on staking to being among the best teams in the Eastern Conference.
""It's been like a fun process to get right back to it. In a sense, I feel like an underdog mentality. ... And that's been fun, having to rebuild who I am and rebuild myself.""Tyrese Haliburton
While Haliburton's individual media availability was filled with assurances on what he would do, the team itself is clearly being cautious.
There won't be a minutes restriction on Tyrese, but the team has been careful and clear with their words, choosing to first find the way to be a good team before they can be a great team.
The franchise will go as Haliburton does, both on the court and off of it, looking to simultaneously recapture the genie in the bottle and to bring back hope for a team recovering from a 19-win campaign that felt like it was stuck in the mud and somehow sinking deeper every single day of the season.
No one understands how unlikely a return this is
Gap years are far harder to pull off than successful rebuilds. Yeah, I said it.
Gap years require players to take massive jumps in opportunity, in scoring, in statistics. in role for a singular season, and then to willingly take a back seat to that in pursuit of winning. By contrast, rebuilds are usually more linear.
While development is by no means easy, players who prove they are able to carry a load are granted more of it. In a rebuild, things sort themselves out.
Bad teams offer their young players far too many touches, hoping that they prove that they can do more with those touches than initially expected.
Good teams, at least good teams during a gap year, offer their lower-usage players far more opportunities, and then hope that they will instead do less with them than expected. One of those options prioritizes development and opportunity. The other is a Faustian bargain of a player getting to taste what it would be to be in a larger role and to ask them to go without it.
Quite simply, the Pacers are trying to do something that most teams fail at: spectacularly
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