How Rick Carlisle’s past impacts Tyrese Haliburton and the Indiana Pacers

DURING A REPLAY review with 22.8 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter of Game 1 of the NBA Finals, the path to Tyrese Haliburton’s game-winning shot was set.

The Pacers were awaiting the outcome of a challenge from coach Rick Carlisle, who wanted officials to double-check whether Pascal Siakam was fouled or had touched the ball last before falling out of bounds.

It was a pivotal swing with Indiana trailing by one point, and Carlisle wanted to make sure his team was prepared for either outcome. If the review was successful, the Pacers would have possession of the ball. If not, he instructed his crew to play defense and get a stop without fouling. And with about an eight-second difference between the shot and game clock, the message was clear. There would not be another timeout. Get the rebound and go.

“Get the ball in Tyrese’s hands,” Carlisle said after the game that evening. “And look to make a play.”

First, the Pacers got the stop — easier said than done against the league’s reigning Most Valuable Player, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, but he missed a 15-foot fadeaway with Andrew Nembhard glued to his hip on defense. Aaron Nesmith corralled a tough rebound over Lu Dort before a crowd of players swarmed to the paint. Nesmith quickly shuffled the ball to Siakam, who found Obi Toppin, who swung the ball to Haliburton, giving him possession just before half court with six seconds remaining on the clock.

What followed was one of the most clutch shots in NBA Finals history. Haliburton dribbled and jab-stepped along the Pacers’ sideline before curling back inside the arc and rising up to score the game-winning basket, a 21-foot jumper with 0.3 seconds remaining as the Pacers stole Game 1 of the series in Oklahoma City.

It may have seemed easy for Carlisle to trust Haliburton in that moment, especially given the budding Pacers star’s propensity for hitting big shots in the biggest moments — Game 1 was his fourth game-winning or game-tying shot in the final seconds of these playoffs — but such faith is years in the making.

The freedom the Pacers play with on offense is born out of the relationship between Carlisle and Haliburton, a bond that began the night after Indiana traded for Haliburton in February 2022. But the groundwork also dates back to Carlisle’s tenure with the Dallas Mavericks, starting in his first season with the team in 2008-09 when he butted heads with Hall of Fame point guard Jason Kidd and continuing when Carlisle was tasked with the handling of another emerging superstar: Luka Doncic.

“What I learned my first year in Dallas was to give J-Kidd the ball and get out of the way, let him run the show, let him run the team,” Carlisle said before the start of the NBA Finals. “Tyrese, very similar situation, but didn’t take half a season to figure it out. The situation in Dallas with Luka was the same.

“It’s pretty clear, when you have a player of that kind of magnitude, that kind of presence, that kind of knowledge, vision and depth, you got to let them do what they do.”

The philosophy has paid off for the Pacers, who took a 2-1 NBA Finals lead over the Oklahoma City Thunder on Wednesday night with a 116-107 victory at Gainbridge Fieldhouse.

Haliburton and Carlisle have been the masterminds behind this Pacers’ offense, which is scoring 116.7 points per 100 possessions in the postseason while featuring a fast-paced style and comeback ethos that has fueled an improbable playoff run through the Eastern Conference.

At the center of it all sits a coach who has learned to adapt through the years with a point guard he happily turned over the reins to.

“When he gave me that nod, that was like the ultimate respect,” Haliburton said after practice Tuesday. “That was the ultimate trust that I could get from anybody, because he is such a brilliant basketball mind. He’s been around such great guards, great players. For him to give me that confidence, I think has really taken my career to another level.”

THE EMPOWERING OF Kidd, a development that followed a lot of headbutting between coach and point guard, could be considered a turning point in Carlisle’s career.

Carlisle carried a reputation for being controlling when he first arrived in Dallas. He was known to clash with players during the early days of his coaching career in his first go-round with Indiana from 2003 to 2007, when he was coaching Metta Sandiford-Artest, Stephen Jackson and Jamaal Tinsley. Those Pacers won 61 games and went to the Eastern Conference finals in 2003-04, but they also played a meticulous style with Carlisle calling plays on nearly every possession.

When Carlisle arrived in Dallas a few years later, he tried to do the same, even with Kidd, 35 years old with nine All-Star appearances, on the roster. It didn’t go over well.

“It wasn’t easy for [Carlisle] to let it go,” former NBA guard J.J. Barea, who played with the Mavs from 2006 to 2011 and again from 2014 to 2020, told ESPN. “To be more free about it. But he knew for us to win he had to let it go. J-Kidd and him went to battle, but it worked out at the end.”

Kidd emphasized how he wanted the offense to be more free-flowing, stressing that a savvy point guard dictating the flow of the game would lead to better rhythm than a coach on the sidelines trying to manufacture it. Carlisle resisted for more than half a season. It wasn’t until midway through the 2010-11 season — his third year coaching Kidd in Dallas — that Carlisle really gave his point guard the reins. The Mavs won the championship that season.

Carlisle didn’t wait nearly as long to give Doncic the keys to the Mavs’ offense. That occurred while Doncic was a teenager in the midst of his Rookie of the Year campaign during the 2018-19 season.

The personal relationship between Carlisle and Doncic was often rocky, but the partnership between coach and point guard produced outstanding offensive results. In Doncic’s second season, the Mavs set the NBA record at the time for offensive efficiency by averaging 115.9 points per 100 possessions.

Carlisle constructed an offensive system that suited Doncic, one that was drastically different from the one that Kidd operated. Carlisle’s Mavs played a heliocentric style with Doncic dominating the ball, emphasizing spacing with stationary spot-up shooting threats as he ran pick-and-roll after pick-and-roll.

The Pacers are succeeding with Haliburton operating a system that is fueled by playing fast and off-ball movement.

“One thing you can say about Rick is he coaches his talent,” Haralabos Voulgaris, the Mavs director of quantitative research and development from 2018 to 2021, told ESPN. “His system is whatever maximizes the talent that he has. He understands that the game is changing and he has to always keep on changing and learning and adapting and growing.

“It’s not many older coaches that have had that mentality, especially ones that had success when they were younger.”

Carlisle’s track record with point guards hasn’t always been perfect. He clashed with Rajon Rondo a few years after Doncic’s rookie season, with Rondo wanting to play more methodically while Carlisle advocated for pushing the pace. The rocky relationship led to Rondo’s tenure in Dallas lasting just 46 games.

“It wasn’t a good fit for either of them,” Barea said.

Carlisle wasn’t a fan of the Mavs’ trade for Rondo, agreeing to it only because Dirk Nowitzki wanted it, and didn’t consider Rondo to be the type of talent that merited offensive control. He had no such reservations about Doncic — or Haliburton.

“When I see Haliburton playing for Rick, he’s free, man,” Barea said. “He looks so free out there. He looks like he’s enjoying the game. He’s playing at a great pace and with confidence. I think Rick got Haliburton’s confidence to be as high as it could be.”

The friction in Carlisle’s relationship with Doncic, a strain that started early in Doncic’s rookie season, was a factor in the winningest coach in franchise history eventually resigning from the Mavericks job after the 2020-21 season. Carlisle and Haliburton, on the other hand, have a harmonious bond, one the veteran coach has gone out of his way to foster.

“One of the things that’s nice to see is that [Carlisle] has a good relationship with the star players or all the players on his team, it seems like,” Voulgaris told ESPN. “Whereas in Dallas, that was probably not the case obviously. There’s some growth there.”

Yet, the Pacers were meandering and looking for a direction as a franchise by the time Carlisle stepped down in Dallas. They finished 34-38 in 2020-21, the only season under coach Nate Bjorkgren, when they jumped at the chance to hire Carlisle for a second stint as head coach. The team was still searching for an identity, but the veteran coach had an idea of the perfect kind of player to craft an offense around.

HALIBURTON COULD HAVE been a Dallas Maverick.

The Mavericks had Haliburton as the No.1 player on their 2020 draft board, based in large part on Voulgaris’ analytics models. Sources told ESPN that the Mavericks dangled their two selections, No. 18 and No. 31, as well as their sometimes starter and sometimes sixth-man guard Jalen Brunson, to every team until Haliburton went off the board at No. 12 to the Sacramento Kings.

“We tried like hell to get him and move up, we just couldn’t do it,” Carlisle said before the start of the Finals. “When I tell you that Mark Cuban tried everything. When Mark puts his mind to something, he can usually figure something out.”

The Mavericks never found a suitor, but Carlisle remained a fan of Haliburton’s game from afar through the start of the point guard’s career.

The veteran coach got hired in Indiana for the 2021-22 season, but his initial roster lacked the kind of guard Carlisle felt he could rely on and he reverted back to his old instincts.

“Rick’s first year here, we had a game where he did that, he stopped us and called a play every single possession,” said Pacers center Myles Turner, who has been with Indiana since 2015, the team’s longest-tenured player. “In the dawn of this new NBA, especially in the playoffs, that stuff doesn’t work.”

The Pacers were 19-37 on Feb. 8, 2022 when they had an opportunity to acquire a player who could be their identity. The Sacramento Kings were looking to offload one of their point guards with De’Aaron Fox also on the roster at that point and they made the move to trade Haliburton to the Pacers for a package involving Domantas Sabonis.

After the deal was finalized, Carlisle started out right away trying to establish a strong relationship with his new focal point. He arranged a dinner the night after the trade with Haliburton and the two other players Indiana acquired — Buddy Hield and Tristan Thompson — at Prime 47 Steakhouse in Indianapolis, about a block away from Gainbridge Fieldhouse. For the final 26 games of that season and with a young Pacers team far from playoff contention, Carlisle allowed Haliburton to get experience improvising and playing on the fly.

“You saw so many glimpses of the creativity that Tyrese exhibits, the ability to make plays with just very basic structure,” Pacers general manager Chad Buchanan told ESPN during a phone interview. “He thrives in situations where there’s a little more freedom and a little less predictability.”

Going into training camp for the 2022-23 season, Carlisle told Haliburton he didn’t want to call plays anymore. Carlisle was handing the offense over to Haliburton, who was 22 years old at the time. He remembered seeing his young point guard’s eyes light up.

“I was surprised,” Haliburton recalled after practice on Tuesday. “Because I know what the conversation around coach [Carlisle] was, especially from point guards.”

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HALIBURTON CREDITS CARLISLE for helping his career reach new heights.

It’s not only the freedom on offense that helped Haliburton make his first All-Star team the following season, averaging a double-double for the first time in his NBA career in the 2022-23 season with a career-high 20.7 points to go along with 10.4 assists. It was also the work off the court, such as teaching Haliburton how to break down film. Haliburton acknowledged at the start of his career, he would watch film of his own points and assists, maybe a few missed shots. Now he was learning how to watch the whole game, searching for ways to make his teammates better.

“[Carlisle’s] just a basketball savant,” Haliburton said. “All that stuff is really important. Really took my career to another level.”

Haliburton has pointed to those growing pains during the start of his career in Indiana as what helped set him up for success years later performing on the highest levels of the NBA Playoffs. But it was the trust the organization showed in Haliburton that helped his confidence on the court grow even higher.

“They’re going to have some ups and downs,” Carlisle said. “They’re going to make some mistakes. If they’re doing it consistent with how they’re seeing the game, the lessons learned will be more impactful.”

The lessons Carlisle learned early in his career have also paid dividends.

After a rough start early on in his relationship with Doncic, Carlisle made a point to get things off on the right note right away with his new superstar.

“Everybody in our league from players to coaches and executives, we all evolve,” Buchanan said. “Rick has evolved just like we all have. He understands that Tyrese is one of those guys. He’s got a fun-loving, joyful personality that rubs off on everybody.

“Tyrese is the kind of guy who you can build a culture around.”

It worked in Indiana. The Pacers are back in the Finals for the first time in 25 years, following up on an Eastern Conference finals berth last season, one of the most successful two-year runs in team history. And at the heart of it are Carlisle and Haliburton, two basketball minds with a mutual respect for one another, thriving to make playoff magic.

Or as Voulgaris told ESPN: “Rick, at this stage of his career in particular, and Haliburton, just seem to be a perfect marriage.”