It’s an odd time for a native New Yorker to heap praise on Tyrese Haliburton, the Indiana Pacers point guard who knifed through the New York Knicks defense like butter in the Eastern Conference finals and fried Gotham’s hope for its first NBA Finals appearance this millennium. But not only did former NBA champion and Queens’ own Metta Sandiford-Artest do so; he also said Haliburton’s dominance in the Knicks series was reminiscent of a certain Basketball Hall of Famer.
As recently as April, his NBA peers voted him the league’s most overrated player. Ouch.
“He reminds me of John Stockton from the perspective of a late bloomer in terms of effectiveness. … Not the same type of player but the same type of impact,” Sandiford-Artest told NBA reporter Brandon Robinson this week.
Stockton, who played 19 years in the NBA, wasn’t considered as elite as Michael Jordan or Scottie Pippen. And to Sandiford-Artest’s point, there’s legitimacy in considering Haliburton a late bloomer. As recently as April, his NBA peers voted him the league’s most overrated player. Ouch. Guess who’s getting the last laugh, though? As the 2025 NBA playoffs have shown, it’s Haliburton’s moment now.
With the NBA Finals starting tonight, he’s the unquestioned leader of an underdog Indiana Pacers team that almost no one thought had a legitimate shot at the title when the playoffs began. He has a chance to do something not even Pacers legend Reggie Miller could do: win Indiana its first NBA title.
Some pundits are bemoaning what the matchup between the Pacers and the Oklahoma City Thunder might mean ratings-wise, as each team resides in the bottom third of NBA cities when ranked by TV market size. We could have had the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics (again) or the Lakers and the Knicks.
Instead, we have… Haliburton. And you know what? That’s fantastic. No, really, it’s great. And here’s why: Haliburton is having a great playoff run, averaging 18.8 points, 9.8 assists and 5.7 rebounds a night (for all his playoff series, six in total, he’s averaged 18.7, 5.3 and 9). He put up 32 points, 15 assists and 12 rebounds in a dominant Game 4 against the Knicks — becoming the only NBA player in history with 30 points and 15 assists while committing no turnovers in a playoff game.
This postseason aside, Haliburton isn’t known for gaudy stats. The real beauty in his game, and what promises to make the finals something worth everybody’s attention, is his efficiency, a statistic that puts a number to how much a player contributes when they’re on the court. The average player efficiency rating in the NBA is 15; Haliburton’s efficiency has been above 20 in each of the past four seasons, and it’s never dipped below 16. This season, he ranked 20th among NBA players, with an efficiency rating of 21.84. The highest rating belonged to the Denver Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic, at 32.12.
It’s the kind of stat that won’t wow casual basketball fans who live for the 3-ball, or old-school fans who long for scoring assassins like Jordan or Carmelo Anthony. Efficiency explains why a player like Haliburton is so significant to the Pacers because the statistic considers how often a player scores the ball and how well they perform on the floor when they don’t have the ball. To put his efficiency rating another way, Haliburton is capable of taking over games — like he did against the Knicks — but he’s also content to shift into a style of basketball that prompted ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, an unabashed Knicks fan, to declare before the Pacers-Knicks series that he’s not a superstar. Like a true point guard, he prefers to move the ball rather than force a low-percentage shot. He gets back on defense. He recognizes when the ball is better off in the hands of a teammate, for example Eastern Conference finals MVP Pascal Siakam. Unsurprisingly, he finished the season ahead of the vanquished Knicks’ Jaylen Brunson — who is a superstar, according to ESPN’s Smith — and the Celtics’ Jayson Tatum, whom the Knicks vanquished in the playoffs, in efficiency rating. It has to be worrisome for the Pacers, but exciting for fans eager for a great finals matchup, that Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is the last barrier standing between them and glory. OKC’s lethal point guard, who posted a 30.73 efficiency rating, is the only one of the 19 players with a better efficiency rating than Haliburton in the finals. Unlike Haliburton, Gilgeous-Alexander has never had his superstar bona fides questioned. If Haliburton and the Pacers can overcome him and a Thunder team that had the best record in the league this year, then the Pacers point guard won’t ever have to worry about being called overrated or being labeled as less than a superstar again.
Keith Reed
Keith Reed is an award-winning journalist and a past senior editor at ESPN. His work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Root, Vibe, Essence and elsewhere. 
